


Tony Spark

by Doodled93



Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Rise of the Guardians (2012), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Belief, Bruce Banner & Tony Stark Friendship, Eventually we'll get through all the Iron Man bits and Avengers and whatnot, Gen, Invention, M/M, Man in Moon doesn't know what to do with Tony, Other, Science Bros, Tony Spark - Freeform, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tony as a guardian sort of, Tony doesn't agree with abrupt name changes, Tony doesn't agree with this not-seeing not-hearing BS, Tony's got electric eyes now, innovation, spirit of
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-22
Updated: 2015-02-28
Packaged: 2018-01-09 16:51:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 10
Words: 47,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1148491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Doodled93/pseuds/Doodled93
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Avengers/Iron Man cross with RotG. Tony Stark died at 20, a few months after his birthday in 1957, protecting his parents from the electrical discharge of a reactor exploding. He wakes, remembers, and when the Moon whispers to him, Tony Spark, he frowns. "How about no."<br/>Where Tony is the spirit of innovation and technology and won't let a thing like death and not being able to be seen or heard or felt hold him back from going on with his life as usual.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. This Spark has not Gone Out

Thing is, he remembers exactly how he died.

In exacting detail.

He remembers all of his life, actually. Just something new. Ish.

Full HD, rewind, play, pause, rewind, play, pause, Fast-forward, pause, rewind.

And that means…

He knows exactly how he died.

Past tense, yes.

Died.

Rewind.

May 29th, 1937, Anthony Stark was born. Two years later, the War did.

He thinks it’s rather appropriate, that just as he’s reaching that important point in every infants life where cognitive function starts kicking it up into high gear, suddenly there’s violence everywhere. It continues.

Becomes the norm.

He’s five, the oops his father had learned to deal with through occasional visits and paying for not-his-biological-mother-but-might-as-well-be best female friend to look after him on wages he gets making… anything. Everything. Knick knacks, cars, things with flashing lights… things that exploded with even more flashing lights.

When she needs a break, Tony is sat with his father as he pours over blueprints, and he learns his alphabet from the periodic table, learns his numbers from coding and labels on parts.

He’s five when he meets Steve Rogers, and is entirely unimpressed.

Steve is earnest, and straightforward, and Tony can tell that he doesn’t understand when his father goes into the Details. He remembers, at that age, dismissing anyone who couldn’t understand the Details. Steve gets credit for not getting that dopey glazed look on his face, but all that means to Tony-at-5 is that he can hang around his dad without much scorn from Tony.

One day, Steve crouches to Tony’s level, his uniform rumpling slightly, and asks why he doesn’t show the same respect—or lack of open hostility—to Colonel Phillips as he does to Steve. As he does to Peggy.

Tony scrunches his nose at him. “Because you didn’t get a stupid face when my dad talked to you.”

And, when Steve kept looking concerned and confused, Tony sighed.

“Because when dad started talking about the Details to you, you looked confused, but you didn’t get that stupid glazed look on your face that just about everyone else does.”

“I didn’t understand half of what your dad said though. Still don’t, not really.”

Tony shook his head and turned back to the old car blueprints he’d borrowed from a desk. “Less than that, yeah, but at least you listened.” He paused, and then snorted. “Colonel Chester listened to somethin’ like 40 seconds of my dad, and then said something stupid like ‘as long as it works’, and stopped listening. People who find themselves in a position to _think_ they have power tend to do that.” He looked Steve in the eyes, and said “You see, he doesn’t get it. The people who get all stupid faced don’t get it. It doesn’t matter if something _works_. It doesn’t even matter if it doesn’t work. What matters, is _why_. Why does or doesn’t it work? You need to know the details, so you can use it, make it better, move forward with it. Move forward, _past_ it.” His tone turns abruptly fond, “Dad’s always doing that.”

He was interrupted from saying anything else by an exclamation from the other side of the work station, and he hurried to roll up the car plans in front of him, because not all of the scientists and engineers (read: none) appreciated Tony borrowing from their desks.

His last bit of wisdom for Steve was a grin and a wink—

“Be the spark Cap! If you’re not moving forward, you’re getting in the way!”

—before running off as fast as his little legs could take him, arms full of military vehicle plans.

Getting scolded by his dad was bad, later, but better when Tony pointed out a flaw in the dummy’s calculations, especially since he could smirk without getting pinched for his cheek.

The small smile he saw on Steve’s face only made his own smirk grow larger.

Even so, he hoped Steve didn’t think this made them friends or anything.

Pause.

Fast-forward.

Play.

Steve is missing, Captain America gone, and his dad has gone into a full blown obsessive compulsive jerk around.

Tony doesn’t get it.

His dad is fantastic, and makes a better and more accurate sonar, better submarines, better ships, better equipment, makes lights that shine on the ocean floor for miles…

And then just stops.

Tony knows he’s got projects on the backburner, ones he could be working on immediately, but he’s off insisting he be part of this or that search party when he could be working on them.

But, as Tony gets older, graduates before any other kid his age is even thinking beyond their next pop quiz, beyond the on-again-never-really-off-again war, he does not understand this.

He sees his dad’s projects, and sees that if they were taken one step further, they could help find Steve goddamn Rogers. Why was his dad looking for this guy now, on his time, when he could be making better, more efficient ways to find the guy!?

Oh don’t get him wrong he understands the friendship. He gets it. He doesn’t remember much about the guy (at that point)beyond that he didn’t get blank faced when his dad talked science. That he was a friendly guy. That he made Auntie Peg happy when he was around.

That he’d been there when his dad hadn’t been turning more and more to alcohol.

Again, don’t get him wrong, reverse-engineering his dad’s drunk inventing was a hoot, very insightful, very engaging. But his dad was going around in circles. Going in pinwheels, really. Forward, tilt-tilt-tilt back tilt-tilt-tilt forwards. Rinse. Repeat.

And the crossing points were always names Steve Rogers.

And God forbid Tony be allowed to help out at all in the search.

Psssh. He kept in mind that the guy was a _good guy_ , because if he ever forgot he might start to hate him. Already didn’t like him because his absence was turning his dad into an alcoholic in an inventing tailspin.

Fucking Rogers.

Pause. Rewind—play.

At the start of his father’s tailspin, Tony was already in the family business. Where his father made the big guns (sometimes literally), Tony was programming. Tony was making smaller things. Had, in the works, a way to communicate long distances through smaller devices, ones that weren’t hooked up to anything at all, and wasn’t a freaking walkie.

Made appliances, made smaller, more efficient batteries, made cars, made planes, made so, so, so many engines.

Where his dad makes contracts with the military, Tony sets him up for a company that means if and when the military stops showing favour, they’ll still have the funding to move forward.

Fast-forward.

Tony has an idea.

A great, great big fucking idea.

It’s the first step to working on, and finishing several other ideas, but he hadn’t realized how so many of them could be linked up until this one big idea.

It was gonna be huge.

He says as much to his father.

“Weren’t you working on a way to make batteries _smaller_?” 

“This one will have to be big, for how much power will be running through it. It could power all of the States for a year. Maybe less in a few years time, considering how much more electricity we’re already using, but still.”  
“A year? All of the US? Ton I don’t have time for this nonsense—“

There was a huge rustling of paper as Tony whipped out his tentative plans, a rough outline of what _could_ be, of what _would_ be with the right amount of attention.

His dad went gratifyingly silent.

“Much easier to search the ocean floor when you don’t have to worry about the power,” he says quietly.

It’s not what Tony was looking to use this for, but if it went right, it could be used for _anything_.

It could be used for _everything_.

Fast-forward.

 _Burning— his nerves were on fire— singing— screaming— the smell of burnt_ hair _— the smell of burnt_ flesh _—he was cooking from the inside out—_

Pause.

Rewind.

Play.

Tony’s 20th birthday went largely unnoticed, except by Maria Stark (who his father had finally noticed was a woman, and intelligent, and brilliant, and thankfully married when he was 9), and, of course, the rest of the world.

If she hadn’t pulled him from the lab, he wouldn’t have even noticed that another day had gone past, and they have cake and doughnuts and flapjacks for dinner, in true Stark tradition, just as his dad stays working through it, in true Stark tradition.

The rest of the world waited with baited breath to see if any of the Starks would make it into a huge blowout, if it was going to be Tony or Howard who drunkenly made his way into the tabloids—not knowing that there were other things to focus on.

They almost had the first model finished. One month—less than one month, and they would have it finished.

Finished.

Tony hoped it worked.

Hoped it _didn’t_ work.

He hadn’t worked uninterrupted with his father like this since—

Never mind.

Less than one month.

They leave a slice of cake and a doughnut next to his dads workstation, and head to the library.

Another tradition.

As much family time as possible..

Fast-forward.

12 days.

Fast-forward.

6 days.

Fast-forward.

8 days—“I didn’t know the damn thing was going to explode!”

Fast-forward.

3 days.

Fast-forward.

Tony rechecked the distance between the inner and outer layers, carrying the tape all the way around to make sure that there was an even 13.7 inches all the way around, no variations, no chips or divots.

Behind him, to the left, in front of him, around, Howard Stark confirms the calculations, checks the output valves, and smooths his moustache.

Maria Stark stand back, watching with sunglasses in hand.

“It’ll be great,” he had told her, “the best thing I’ve ever made,” and she had gone out and bought them.

“So I don’t get blinded by your brilliance,” she said afterwards.

The ring was in place, the customized crane ready to lower it equidistant from the inner and outer layers, and then it was ready.

The switch was turned, and Tony can’t stay still. Has to move, eyes fixed to where history was being remade, and he doesn’t even have room in his head to think about what else this’ll mean to—well, everyone else.

Tony grew up always having eyes on him, from the military to the media and public as the Stark name became a _thing_ , and when the newspapers weren’t getting people into a panic over the war they were getting their jollies by dishing out every little thing the Starks were doing.

But he’d never felt like the whole world was holding it’s breath for this, and he thinks he understands how his dad felt when turning Steven Rogers into the Super soldier Captain America.

Five feet, three, two, one, 3/5ths, 5/9ths, it gets closer and closer to the space it should be, and Tony sees when it’s nearing 5 inches to where it should be that the ring is… slightly off.

On anything else, it wouldn’t matter, but this thing here… this would be bad. It’d be horrible.

He has a moment to doubt—what if he’s wrong? It should work fine, right? A little jostling shouldn’t be an issue, right?—before sense knocks into him, and he’s running back to his parents, “FUCKING STOP IT NOW!” because of course he’s right.

His mother turns to him, a slightly shocked and quizzical smile on her face, his father just looks bewildered, but he doesn’t get his hand to the fucking controls in time.

His parents are on the raised rubber platform, and in the few seconds between his shout and the charged hum of the reactor getting ready for a horrific electrical discharge, Tony thinks.

 _Be the spark_ , he’d once told Steve, _if you don’t move forward, you’re in the way_. His mom had always told him that he’d been the brightest spark in her life, and he’d taken that and turned it into his life’s motto, because you had to move forward. If you stayed still, you’d wallow in unproductive thoughts and questions like why your father doesn’t seem to care, or why couldn’t he be more like the other kids, because it was a big thing for him to realize as a kid that he shouldn’t have to hold back.

That he _didn’t_ have to hold back.

He could move forward as fast as he wanted.

He was the spark that ignited the fire, he was the spark that started the car, he was—he could be the spark to a whole new freaking world.

But even with this healthily and reasonably inflated sense of self worth, Tony also knew that you didn’t _mow down_ people in your way to move forward. And this was his idea, and he wasn’t going to let it mow down his parents. His father was an insensitive dick, and his mother could be incredibly vapid sometimes, but they were his, they were important to him, and this was his idea. His responsibility.

They were on the rubber platform, but Tony wasn’t. They’d still likely get hit, even with no metal on them, of only because they were in the way… unless the electricity had a more appealing target.

Well, one of Tony’s greatest qualities was how attractive he could be.

He grabbed a metal wrench from where it was nearby, and he can feel the cackle of electricity as he picks up the first metal rod that comes to hand, and hurls himself front and center.

His heart pounded, and he had a moment of regret, but—

Everything exploded.

Pause. Fast forward.

Fast forward.

And that was how he died.

That was a couple of days ago, and apparently his body is still too electrically charged for anyone to move it, or touch it, or even go into the freaking room, because he wakes up alone with only his body for company.

He knows he died, and that’s distracting, but so is this.

Electrocution is not a pleasant way to go.

When he wakes up from dying to find that technology _sings_ around him, electricity _dancing through him_ , and his head is just as full of ideas as it was before his death—even more so, now that he can apparently review his life and death in exacting detail—he marvels.

Electrocution is not a pleasant way to go, but this—whatever it is; well it’s certainly a nice way to come back.

In seconds he’s travelled through each and every piece of equipment around him, and around the house, and outside, all in blinks and microseconds, and he’s outside hanging—he’s fucking _flying_ using the electromagnetic differences in the fucking _earth_!—and the moon is peeking through the clouds, huge and ordinary except that Tony can feel that there’s tech there. Far away, far, _far_ away, but there’s tech on the moon, and it’s old, and there’s so much to be learned from it he just wants to reverse engineer the whole thing—

His thoughts are interrupted by a thought.

It’s not his, and somehow he knows it’s the moons—infers that he actually means it’s _whoever_ is _on the moon_ —but it’s in his head anyway.

 _Tony Spark_ , it says.

Tony doesn’t know what that means, and so puts it aside for the moment. Heads back down to ground, and goes through the electronic lock on the door to find his parents.

Dad is drinking, and beside him his mother is crying, and it abruptly hits him that oh, right, he died, and it hits him again when instead of making contact his hand just fazes through his mother’s shaking shoulder.

 _Tony Spark_ , the moon whispers in his mind, again, and he bristles.

“Fuck _that_ ,” he says in response, because he fucking gets what’s trying to happen, and he’s _not fucking dealing with it_ , and the monitors and coding boards that dominated his fathers room come to life.

Maria, _his mother_ , shrieks, and Howard, _his father_ , looks up with eyes only slightly muzzy with alcohol.

 **NOT DEAD** he writes, has displayed in words, in coding, in fucking Morse code, on every screen.

His mother whimpers, a dying sound deep in her throat, and new tears well up.

His father says nothing.

Tony thinks of the one thing that would get his mother to believe, and looks to the ceiling, through it to the great looming glow of the moon.

He was sure there were rules to this, and he was probably breaking all of them, but Tony grew up knowing that rules were for people who couldn’t think of a way around them.

People couldn’t see him, hear him, feel his touch, so he was going to stop being Tony Fucking Stark?

He glared, and the lights flickered. Electricity fills his eyes, and his grin is sharp enough to cut diamonds.

“Fuck. That. Shit.”

The words on the monitors shift.

**THIS SPARK HAS NOT GONE OUT.**


	2. Steps along the way

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *shrugs* so each chapter's going to be roughly 7 pages?  
> Let me know what you think.

It isn’t as difficult as Tony had feared it would be to get his parents on the same page.

It’s much more difficult even getting them on the same freaking book, however, and they still can’t see him. He doesn’t know if he’ll ever be seen.

He shrugs, and puts that thought aside.

Howard had tried to delete him as a virus, at first, and there had been talk from Maria about getting a priest into the building for an exorcism, but Tony hadn’t known them for his entire life for nothing.

He didn’t think his dad believed that he was really, fully his son, but Tony’s knowledge and willingness to work seemed to be enough.  
But his mother believes, at least.

He thinks it might be because it’s just easier to believe than it is to face the fact that he died.

As it is, nothing much changes around the Stark household…

Only now Tony appears more absent than even Howard.

Only now, to fight that appearance, there was now some sort of monitor or screen in every part of the house.

Life moved on.

.-~-~-~~-~-~.

Tony likes Jarvis.

Retired from the British RAF, and champion boxer for three years running, his move to the US of A was timed perfectly.

The guy is hired to ‘look after Tony’, and as the world at large is under the impression that an accident has damaged Tony Stark enough that he’s refusing to address the public, it’s hard to argue with that.

The guy is maybe a year older than Howard was, hair receding a bit more, certainly, and Tony gives him a month to get into the hang of things, of getting used to the run of the house while his parents took hold of the public aspect of the company, before deciding to let him in on the little secret.

The reason, he’ll reflect later, that he decides to keep Jarvis on as a permanent caretaker, is because instead of freaking out or going into complete denial over everything, Jarvis simply looks around the monitor room that Tony had laid claim on, and said, “I suppose this means I won’t have to clean up after you like your father.”

When Tony stayed silent from surprise, the man raised an eyebrow at the monitors.

“What with the lack of body, sir?"

Honestly, the guy was a hoot.

.-~-~-~~-~-~.

The world grows, and technology with it, and Tony can go farther, go faster, see so much more, and he loves it.

He’s got more toys to work with, he’s got more people to connect with as more and more communication shifts technologically, and he’s there with his dad making things in a way he’s never been able to do before.

Tony doesn’t really need sleep—when he goes too fast, gets too immersed in the tech around him and pushes beyond their current abilities, his head gets a bit overheated, and there tend to be power outages besides—and that leaves him time to move forward.

Stark Industries experienced a bit of a stock drop when Tony suddenly disappeared from the social scene, when he seemed to suddenly shift from social butterfly to more-than-proverbial-hermitage, but he’d let just enough of the accident to be released that most people think he’s hiding because of scars and possibly the inability to walk.

Stocks go up after that possibility gets leaked, as there are quite a few quadriplegics and amputees around, and Tony’s name is on almost two thirds of the patents, and it’s a weird mash-up of flack for not ‘standing up’ for himself and going on with his life, and kudos for pumping out even more of what was being referred to as StarkTech despite his supposed injuries.

Tony starts looking into the making and manufacturing of synthetic limbs out of curiosity, and finds that in most cases there’s not much being done.

Wheelchairs are getting better, better cushioning against the severed limbs being replaced is getting looked into, and yet Tony looks at the designs and thinks, I could do better.

And the spark of an idea niggles at the back of his mind.

Lieutenant Greg Mattheson has lost his left leg almost all the way to the hip, and after he’s given permission, Tony has his people sent to the hospital to take measurements.

Measurements of his remaining leg, of how big his foot is, the distance between his hip to heel, hip to the top of his knee, hip to the bottom of his knee, distance from the tips of his toes to his knee, measurements around his ankle, calf, thigh, knee…

Mattheson takes all the pictures and measuring with some bemusement, and when Tony needs more measurements later it’s just as much of a laugh for him and his fellow amputees the second time around.

The third time around there’s slightly less laughter, and more stunned silence, as Jarvis shows up with much of the same team to present a functioning mechanical limb to the Lieutenant.

Tony is glad that he likes it, is glad that he’s started up a department devoted to this, to looking into more efficient and useful prosthetics, but thinks it could be better.

Even as he watches the man sit for a mold to be taken of his stump—the last step (ha) towards getting him on his feet (ha)—he thinks that the shape could be better, it could be shifted to take weight better, it could be shifted to be lighter with different materials, the pressure points that should allow for some independent movement in the limb—the ones that had required he sit in on a few physiotherapy courses just to see quite how pressure in that part of the leg were meant to react—could be more efficient…

He thinks and he thinks and he thinks about all the ways it could go better, and then he sees a man looking at the slightly staggering Lieutenant with some awe and envy, and sends a message to Jarvis’s pager that he should ask the other man—ironically Colonel Connor Armitage—if measurements could be taken of and about his arm.

The idea grows in his mind.

.-~-~-~~-~-~.

Tony figures out a voice-modulating software right about the same time as his dad hits a slump.

Howard had so many ideas, but not too many ways to connect them, no idea where to start on them, and despite having looked at them himself Tony was stumped as well.

He’s working on the vocal-software because he has an idea on the go, but t doesn’t have anything do to with anything important. They still get funding form the military to make weapons, and for a while that seemed to make them happy, but stress form the war was… well. It just wasn’t that great at getting the creative juices flowing.

Civil war or otherwise, war wasn’t great.

Tony didn’t have to worry about much himself—no need for food, hardly any need for sleep, and he’d already gotten that dying business out of the way, and that cut out disease from the equation—but that didn’t meant that it wasn’t still going on for everyone else.

But there are only so many ways to make a thing that shot out bullets, especially with how short on materials everyone was.

What materials they did have were needed by the Other Guys, and vice versa, and Howard wouldn’t be getting many more chances to go searching for Rogers if things continued.

Tony sighed and ran a hand through his hair. He kind of hoped his software was even remotely close to a stage where he could just finish up a few parts and be able to have real(ish) conversations with people again, because he loved his mom but sometimes she didn’t know quite what to say to get him to snap out of his funks.

Howards eyes started straying towards the liquor cabinet, mind obviously shifting courses, and Tony scowled, “C’mon dad, you can have booze on the brain later,” and swiped a hand in his direction. It wouldn’t connect, and it would leave his hand feeling a bit chilled, but he needed to feel like he was showing his disapproval in some way—

“YEOWCH!”

His hand did pass through Howard’s head, mostly clipping through his ear, and he’d jerked back like he’s been shocked.

Eyes wide and looking around, rubbing his ear, Howard didn’t see Tony’s flailing, because he did not mean to do that, not that it wasn’t neat and reassuring that he could still interact with people, but he didn’t want it to be quite so shocking.

But Tony did see when his confused searching suddenly stilled, eyes going focused—not on Tony, but focused inwards—and some idea obviously took root in his brain because he immediately pulled a sheet of paper closer, and started writing.

Confused himself now, Tony peered over his shoulder at the equations, and just watched for a few minutes.

When what Howard was thinking started to take form on the paper, Tony’s eyes widened, and a grin slowly grew on his face.

“Oh,” he murmurs, baring his teeth, “that is brilliant. That is fucking brilliant.”

.-~-~-~~-~-~.

He keeps an eye on the project—something that seemed very similar to the wonders of Captain Nemo’s vessel, minus library—Tony has to keep most of his attention everywhere else.

Experimenting, Tony had tried swiping a hand through various people’s head to no real effect, except in a few cases he’s come to refer to as the ‘Eureka’s.

If someone’s focusing on something, or actually doing something steadily, the head-swipey thing doesn’t work. If they’re dazed or looking off into the distance, or slowing down in what they’re doing, or even remotely distracted, it’s got a 60% chance of happening.

Once he’d narrowed down the variables, he’d tried it on a rough hundred people of varying ages, he also figured out that it helps if he knows the sort of person they are. Or at least what they’re interested in. But it doesn’t matter much.

The thing is, apparently when he punches people through the head, they have a little over half a chance of getting inspiration for something. Usually something good. He’s usually impressed when he sticks around the Science guys and engineering groups, but he’s impressed too when one lady rushes to go and get her paints out, and hey, he wasn’t a huge artsy guy, but he could appreciate it.

It was also nice to see that he and his dad hadn’t been the only ones to go rushing off when they had an idea, sometimes (many times) ignoring food, water, and rest in order to get all the thoughts out.

So now he has a reason to get out of what is turning into the most technologically advanced sub-basement at least in the USA, and he’s not so arrogant to think that it’s his head-punching that seems to knock productivity and innovative technology to a higher gear, but he’s sure he’s done enough to earn a pat on his back.

In the papers he hears about new tech somewhere in Russia, something that might kick his voice modulating gear to the level he needs, so he leaves a couple of messages for his mom (calling her Maria in case the message was intercepted), and setting it up in code on his dad’s computer—he was much more likely to read that than the written word.

And he’s off.

Instead of taking hours upon hours, the trip takes him maybe 30 minutes.

He thinks he could have gotten it down to 20, but there was an entire section of the map that had practically no tech beyond a crotchety radio tower, and he’d actually had to fly to get past that part.

Well—he said fly, but it was all about the magnetic and electric currents in the air and in the earth and really all you needed to know about it was that it was actually really fun and he was probably just going to fly back on his own.

He’s going faster than a plane anyway—maybe not as fast as jumping from one bit of tech to another, riding on power lines, but still. Pretty fucking fast.

.-~-~-~~-~-~.

A rough week later (Russia was BIG, and there wasn’t all that much digital information out there to go on… yet), and Tony had a working model in his head. It may sound cocky to say so, but yeah it was a working model, and putting it together would be the matter of a few hours at most.  
The trip home took him two hours, but that’s because he flew most of the way there, and he immediately gets to work.

Parts jumping to meet his fingers, electricity sparking, he grins.

He’ll tell his parents he’s back once he’s finished.

.-~-~-~~-~-~.

“Hey I’m ba—ooooookaaaay that’s a bit too high, too high, too high, lower, loooowwwer, maaaayyybe a bit too low so where… hey mom? This voice is a bit too high, right? I’m more of a baritone… hmm, hmm, HMMMMMMMMMM okay, sounds about right? Right. Well, I’m back, got what I needed, and look! Or rather don’t look, listen! I can talk and you can hear me, and that’s a big difference—mom. Mom. You can’t cry right now mom. Mom. Maria Stark, what did you always tell me about how society women didn’t let their mascara run, and now you’re— … I haven’t figured out how to make this thing sigh quite yet, but that’s what I just did. Mom. Really, yes, I love you too—didn’t quite believe that I wasn’t, you know, really dead, right? Well then—yes mom. I love you too. I’m here—I’m not in the machine, I’m just making it talk, I can’t actually feel those hug—nevermind, of course I do! Yes, I love you. Please stop crying.”

.-~-~-~~-~-~.

Realization shifts the first time Tony sees Santa Clause—well, technically it shifted the first time he felt something that was some mix of tech and other stuff, but he didn’t realize it was freaking Saint Nick until he flew up above the trees to investigate.

And then it was a game of what doesn’t belong with this image.

He’d like to say that the guy didn’t exist any more now than he did when Tony was a kid, but it’s hard to say that with any certainty when a guy (chubby, red suit, white beard, tattoos, swords) speeds past on a sleigh (festively coloured, filled with bags of toys, equipped with highly developed monitors and aerial equipment and various other tech) pulled by reindeers (fuzzy, flying, pointy antlers and hooves flailing at dangerous speeds) on Christmas Eve.

He stares after it, blinking. “Huh.”

And takes a picture.

The thing he was finding was that with every bit of tech he developed, with every upgrade and modification that made things run faster, farther, better, it was like he was upgrading his brain along with it. Shivers up his spine, the lightheaded feeling of alcohol mixing with the euphoria of figuring out a problem, and BAM he was finding more things he could do.

So when he said he took a picture, he wasn’t saying he was pulling a huge camera out and setting it up and taking a picture that would then have to be developed and set up, no, he was saying he consciously decided to rewind a bit in his head and send that information to his set up in the basement, because that was fucking Santa Clause delivering presents, and how the hell as this escaped everyone for so long?

It was a commonly accepted untruth. A holiday focused on the birth of a guy who would have actually been born sometime in June historically, designed to get people to spend more money than they have to prove they love their family the most once a year.

Fucking Santa Clause.

Jarvis is cleaning up in the main control area—the only person outside of the family allowed down there—when Tony returns from staring blankly at where Santa Clause once was, and he pulls the pictures of Santa Clause up on every monitor, reexamining from every angle he can manage.  
Jarvis, used to Tony abruptly changing the contents of the screens only looks up for a moment before going back to neatening everything. “Very nice, sir. The stars are particularly brilliant tonight.”

Tony stares at him.

“Really. I show you a picture of Santa Clause on his sleigh and you appreciate the stars?”

He’s about to have his audio program say a such when he pauses, thinks, and instead says, “What do you see in this screen?” highlighting the edges of the screen showing a side view of what was clearly Santa on his sleigh pulled by reindeer.

Jarvis straightens and peers at the screen. Through Tony’s head, where he stands right in front of him, watching where his eyes focus—watching how his eyes don’t focus where they should.

“Hmm, there’s the large dipper, part of the small dipper, and what I believe is Orion’s belt… I’m afraid astrology isn’t my strong point, sir.” He looks at the screens, eyebrows raised and waiting for Tony to either ask him something else or perhaps explain, but Tony doesn’t have words for him right now.

He had pictures of the jolly fat man himself, and Jarvis’s eyes had slid right past it. No focus.

His eyes slid through like he wasn’t there.

He couldn’t see him.

Couldn’t see Saint Nick… like he couldn’t see Tony?

Like he could look through Tony to see the screen?

Tony frowned.

Okay…

So what did Tony have in common with Santa Clause?

.-~-~-~~-~-~.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Anyone see what Tony's idea's are all coalescing into possibly being?  
> EDIT: Sorry for repeated updates of this one chapter Ao3 is being weird with how this translates, and instead of naturally changing the page breaks/new lines into the much loved and easy to read with gaps, it was all one block. Not appreciated Ao3. Not fun.  
> Also, I think of Tony's bitch-slap of inspiration as his version of Jack Frosts sparkly-eye giving snowballs.


	3. And Then It Hit Me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> as ever, no beta. There is never a beta. Not for anything.  
> EDITED: It's actually 1962 in this chapter. I accidentally wrote 1937 before, and that's when Tony was 'born'. He'd be 25.

 

It sounds like the beginning of a joke thought up by the media— The ones with too many alternative punch lines to be properly remembered.

_Howard Stark and Tony Stark walk into a bar;_

_Howard drinks it out of business—_

_Tony stops to analyze all the alloys in the bar—_

_Howard weaponized it—_

_Tony takes it apart and makes a_ better _weaponized version of it—_

Too many punch lines.

_What do Tony Stark and Santa Clause have in common?_

Well, before his electrical accident, it would have a punch line revolving around, but not restricted to, money, flying, booze, being good once a year…

After his accident, all those and more, but maybe something about showing his face only once a year— _oh wait, Tony Stark doesn’t even do **that** much anymore._

(But he’s working on that, he is, he _is_ if they’d just _wait_ —)

And he thinks it’s funny how for the first few months after the incident with the reactor the media was sympathetic for him and his parents.

A few months past that they wondered how extensive his injuries were, and when he was going to come out from his self imposed isolation—or, some speculated, the isolation enforced by his parents.

At the end of the first year, people were speculating about the scarring he must’ve experienced, for social butterfly Tony Stark to hole up in his house for a whole year.

Rumors from horrific facial scarring to having somehow lost a limb— _Must be why he’s so interested in going into prosthetics nowadays_ —and even talks of maybe losing feeling in his legs— _can’t be more’n that, else Stark Industries wouldn’t be doin’ so well, would’n it?_

Tony doesn’t actually care what the media thinks, but the stress of it shows on his parents faces.

And the thing about that is now Tony can’t focus on shit like what he and Santa Clause could have in common, jokes aside, and his possible long-term solution isn’t going to be done in time, so…

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

When he announces that he’ll be attending a press conference that May, the world lights up with gossip.

Howard doesn’t say anything about it, and Maria only looks slightly less strained, more confused, and it’s mostly Jarvis that Tony has to field questions from.

The man is brilliant, really, Tony wouldn’t be able to handle having him around if he were anything less, but he can’t see the calculations and diagrams behind Tony’s eyelids. He can only see the sparks let off as he fine-tunes the insides of the screens—eventually, he can make it more compact, eventually he thinks he can find a way for it to be much more efficient, more user friendly, more useful to those who can’t just light it up with colour from a thought—can only see that _that_ is what Tony is working on after his impromptu announcement.

When it’s finally set up—in the testing room rather than in Tony’s basement level, because there would be no way for it to fit through any sort of door there assembled—Maria and Jarvis are looking over the large screen with some confusion.

It’s roughly 5’x9’x3’, and Tony isn’t happy with that thickness at _all_ —but it’s a start, he has to remember that, it’s a _start_ —and looks so much like a big metal box with a black screen—

And then Tony walks through it, and Maria gasps behind him.

Tony turns, and grins from inside the screen.

“Aaand would you look at that—or rather look at me, as it were. Aren’t I a sight for sore eyes hey mom?”

It’s a bit distracting, really—Tony found that he could move through anything that has any thought behind it—not like organic, living things, but anything that required some sort of innovation behind it, he could go through. Bit of circuitry? No problem. He could walk through a nuclear reactor now like it was a walk in the park.

If he wanted to step out in the street, cars prove no problem for him, though he had to watch out for the drivers because _whoo_ was that not a nice feeling.

He couldn’t really walk through doors, or really walls—most times. But if that door had a lock on it?  A blink and he was through.

If that wall had crowbar through it? He just had to find a joint spot and he would be through.

But that wasn’t really going through the walls or the doors themselves, it was more like he was exploring the bits and pieces that made up the construct for an 80th of a millisecond before he could examine it from the other side.

But this…

He was standing directly inside of one of his own designs, he was surrounded by his machinery; circuits, directive programing, lights, sounds—nothing anyone else could hear but the tech was a low, continuous song around him.

He already had several ideas for improvements being noted at the back of his mind, but that, along with—

Whatever he could call _this_.

The screen was like a very large version of a television, but with so many more individual points of reference for him to use—any less and the image would be so pixelated as to have been a lost cause for his plans.

He hadn’t looked in a mirror since—that gave him pause.

It was… 1962.

He blinked.

5 years? Huh. That saying about time flying seemed to hold true, even after—well.

Even after all this time, he supposes.

But something about the display must be off because his mother was staring at him—at him, oh _fuck_ did he miss direct eye contact—and she was teary eyed but also a little shocked and mildly frightened looking.

And then Howard walks in, looks at him on the screen, and says,  
“What the hell is wrong with your eyes?”

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

So, it turns out, Tony has crazy electricity eyes now.

Not a problem.

Odd, yes, but not a problem.

When he walked through the screen he projected himself through the pixels, his image showing through, but there shouldn’t be any problem with… editing.

It takes a little bit, but eventually he adjusts the visual enough that he has blank eyes to fill in, after having to remove the glow on his face, and then he models his eyes after his mothers.

Maria’s, he means.

He’d been told one whisky-filled night that he had his mother’s eyes, from Howard, but as Tony hadn’t ever met the woman (or cared to) it hadn’t really mattered. He’d been proud that he looked so much like his dad—hair the slightest bit more chocolate, skin tone a bit darker, a slightly different jaw line, maybe—and Tony hadn’t been so different as a child that he could forgive being cast off like so much junk.

Wasn’t so noble that he couldn’t be petty about it.

So he looks at old pictures of himself, and adjusts things so that he can look older, uses his mother’s eyes as a format for how his digital-screen eyes would look, and BAM.

Tony Stark is back.

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

The press conference stirs everyone up.

Sales go up as well.

Investors, who were already rolling in, start rolling faster.

Because Tony Stark is. in every sense of the word, in every _format_ , awesome.

He really is, all modestly aside.

Speculators swear he must be behind the stage, swear that he must be somewhere close by for this to be possible, and Tony smirks, “Oh, right, I’m somewhere close alright, I’m inside the screen _itself_ ,” and then strolls off screen.

Then back.

He’s telling the truth, but they don’t believe him, and that’s okay because they laugh, and he laughs, and it’s exactly what he wants to happen.

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

It’s not much fun, now, that Tony has to go to some press conferences now, and to meetings involving Stark Inc. once he makes a more manageable screen size, but now he’s almost solidified the rumors that he’s simply become reclusive, isn’t crippled, is mildly scarred…

And he can go back to his projects.

So there’s that.

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

He doesn’t think on the Santa Clause thing until he’s roaming about one night for a little inspiration and there’s gold sand everywhere.

Like, _everywhere_.

He follows the streams of it, because hey, when there’s strings of gold sand floating about, heading into houses, and there’s no screaming, he’d like to know what’s going on and why there’s, you know, no screaming because there probably should…

And he sees a little golden guy orchestrating it all from a golden cloud, and really?

Tony didn’t think he could get high anymore.

He floats up to the guys level to get a better look; arms crossed, and can’t get over how short he is.

The Golden guy looks back at him looking surprised but not saying anything.

And waved.

If he were the sort of person to think of such things, he’d think it were adorable, but there was still the matter of menacing old streams of sand, so.

Tony shook his head.

“Nope, nu-uh, guys putting weird gold sand stuff in people’s houses can’t play innocent. So. What’s all this?”

The little guy looked surprised.

And then the gold sand stuff around him started moving.

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

Tony is a pretty clever—know what? No.

Tony is a fucking _genius_.

So it didn’t take more than a single repeat of images for him to figure out that the little guy doesn’t—or _can’t_ —speak. Not aloud anyway.

And it makes sense, in a fairytale sort of way, that the _Sandman_ is mute.

Wouldn’t want to wake the people you just put to sleep, huh?

All that aside, Tony doesn’t see why he shouldn’t be able to speak out here, far from where anyone else would be able to hear, and is already figuring out a way to adjust his own speaker so that the little guy could speak.

He almost misses the question directed at him (read: the Sandman pointed at Tony with a question mark over his head).

“Hmm? I’m Tony, Tony Stark. You might’ve… well, no, I have no clue if you’ve heard of me, do you listen to the radio? Read the papers—can you read? Paper might be more likely, though really, it all depends on which paper you read to figure out if what you’ll hear is a good or bad thing for me.”

The little guy (he really couldn’t take himself seriously thinking of him as ‘the sandman’, despite the fact that he was her, now, talking to the actual sandman) was nodding, eyes lighting up and the little image above his head is…

A little disembodied arm and leg waving and kicking.

“Tony Stark=prosthetics, huh? Most people think Tony Stark=weaponry first thing, though I can’t say this is a terribly bad change… what?”

The little guy was smiling and nodding, pointing down towards the houses and, when Tony looked confused (he was a genius, not a mind-reader), gestured for Tony to follow him.

Sand swirled around him in weird puffs all the way to their destination. Which was a house.

The little guy hopped through a window, and when Tony followed he found that their apparent destination was some kids room. A small trail of sand was trailing from his bed—and okay, Tony can’t help but feel a bit creeped out at the visual, even though he’s not getting any creeper vibes coming from the little guy—and with a gesture from the little guy the strand thickened. Miscellaneous sand around him jumped up to form a kid—the kid in the bed, Tony realized—running around with other kids, playing with a ball. The little guy beamed at Tony, and gestured at the mini-movie going around the kids bed.

“Yeah, okay, so the kid’s dreaming about playing some kick ball, what’s—”

And of course that’s when the kid shifts under his covers, and Tony sees what the big deal is.

Because the kid didn’t have an arm.

“Ah. Well then. You know we’re nowhere near the point where our prosthetics are going to be in anyone’s price range, right? The kids parents likely don’t have a couple thousand dollars around for a prosthetic arm that he’ll grow out of in less than a years time, when they’ll have to fork out another several thousand for a new one.”

The little guy smiled at him, and pointed at his heart, then at his head, and then at the kid, and mimed a smile over top of the one already on his face.

“Yeah, I didn’t get that one at all. No clue what you’re saying. But as much fun as it is lurking in an eight-year-olds bedroom while he sleeps, I only stayed out this long to make sure you weren’t doing anything, you know, _creepy_ with your golden sand stuff. But dreams, dreams are not creepy. So.”

Tony gave the little guy a sort of awkward wave (what? How do you say goodbye to the sandman? It’s not a thing he ever expected to have to do in life), and left through the electrical socket.

Up in the air he looked around at the streams of gold in the air, a whole root system of dream sand, and shrugged to himself.

“You don’t see that everyday…”

Though would he? If he left his workshop tomorrow night, would the little guy be back? The streams went on as far as he could see, so he supposed so long as it was night time he’d be working, and it was always nighttime somewhere.

He frowned. Did that mean that the little guy was just always moving around the globe, chasing the sunset?

“Well that’s just inefficient—hey, and he’s back.”

The little guy was back in front of him on a smaller cloud of gold sand, and held out a hand to Tony, palm facing upwards. There was nothing on it.

“What is that, what are you—”

And the little guy blew, sand flying into Tony’s face, and he didn’t have the time to be annoyed before he was asleep.

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

And then he was gasping awake, ideas—just so many idea’s—he had to get them down, there was so much to do—he had to—

The little guy seemed surprised, eyes comically wide, and Tony must not have been out for long—better not have, he had too many things knocking around in his head to make a reality—but he didn’t have time for small talk.

“Right, thanks for the nap—don’t do it again, I just gotta—”

And he was gone, visions of propulsors and missiles and explosives going off in his head.

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

Jarvis jumped from where he was picking up miscellaneous items around the workshop when it near literally came alive. Screens came on with specs racing across them almost as fast as Tony could think them up, and continued faster than he could register on a physical scale.

Tony had so many ideas running through his head, solutions to problems he hadn’t even considered as problems before, and he just—didn’t have enough screens for it. Didn’t, and that wasn’t ok, that was the exact opposite of ok, and he’d have that fixed as soon as he could—

Half the monitors he had running with weapons designs, and the other half ran with everything else.

He had new designs drawing themselves up on one scree for getting the proper dexterity for fingers in a mechanical hand on one screen, another held specs for a more efficient microwave before switching to an automated system for hot-air-ballooning, another screen was for a more fuel-efficient tractor, and another was the beginnings for a music player that could fit in your pocket—after it was out of beta, of course.

Credit where it’s due, Jarvis didn’t flee from the workroom at the sudden flurry of activity, only finished clearing up the room before heading up the stairs.

Through the speakers he’d set up at the top, Tony heard him tell one of the maids to let Mrs. Stark know that Tony would likely be busy until the following evening, and then he turned the rest of his attention to his screens.

Off screen, he had several other ideas percolating in his mind, possibilities and possibilities developed after previous concepts were made reality, and in the dark of his workroom, Tony Stark closed his eyes and let his mind do the work of hundreds.

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

Tony stayed consistently busy with his ideas for three days, and a fourth was spent going through his ideas to find what he could use now—rather than the several dozen ideas that could only happen after certain other plans and possibilities were well out of beta testing.

He also set aside several plans for weapons and various other government-useful designs for much, much later, because they were not the sort of thing you hand out when you’ve got a couple of civil movements happening in your country. Those he plans to rework and make better, and figure out at what point would the US be responsible enough to have relative doomsday devices on hand. Or when he figures out what the other countries and governments have up their sleeves, because there are a couple of designs on his hard drive could be the definition of over-kill.

Nuke levels without the Nuke aftereffects.

Not something he was just going to be giving out.

When he finally does make it out of his workroom, he accidentally startles his mom when he talks out of the speakers in the lounge—“hey mom, sorry about tha—yeah, sorry about that, too, the stain’ll come out, I think,”—and spends some time catching up on the four days gossip he’d missed. He got the general idea from increasing online-databases, but Maria Stark was the one to go to for the in-depth analysis.

He caught her up on some of the ideas he was thinking could go on the market within the year, adjusted the order in which the products would come out on Maria’s suggestion, and generally had a great talk with his mom.

He didn’t think he had talks quite like this before he’d died—or whatever it was that he did.

Tony wasn’t entirely sold on the idea that he’d died. He was totally up for the idea that hid _body_ had died, or been damaged enough that it was no longer usable, and Tony was having an extended out-of-body-experience.

Yeah, he didn’t know how that worked out, but when you were dead, you were dead; you couldn’t do anything after that point.

Do not pass go, do not collect $200, and you sure as hell couldn’t continue inventing and tinkering and being an all-around badass.

But Tony was going, he made much more than $200 per hour of _existing_ , never mind that he didn’t really need to use any of it, and he’d just cranked out several years worth of inventions in the span of 4 days.

So Tony and death? An eventual thing, but not something he’s experienced yet.

It’s more like he’s been updated, gone to the next level of being—who’s to say that Santa Clause and the Sand Man aren’t examples of that? Only, you know, Tony went for the existing and still being a known relevant way of things, rather than the whole drifting back to a general unknown/myth thing they’ve got going on.

But the main thing is that Tony is moving forward, he’s progressing—

Dead people? They didn’t do that.

So Tony wasn’t dead.

He just wasn’t alive in the most common sense of the word.

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

He was half-tempted to go try and find the little golden guy (aka The Sandman, but he still can’t think that with any sense of seriousness), but he’s got other things to do.

And the little guy has his dream thing to do, so he figures they’re both doing their own thing—and besides, Tony had been MIA from the rest of the world for 5 days, so he figured if he was expected to try and find the guy after their last meeting, he’d already stood him up, so.

Tony shakes his head, and can just about feel all the thoughts in his head knock against one another.

He wonders if there are other holiday and superstition-y beings out there. Was there a leprechaun for St. Patrick’s day, or was there some actual Saint out there charming snakes? He didn’t think there was any possibility to there being the Easter Bunny, but he could see there being a Tooth Fairy, and maybe—what was that one Americanized Norse winter spirit? Jokul Frosti, aka Jack Frost. He’d like to meet that guy. When Tony had been a kid, when he wasn’t tinkering and reading engineering books, he’d really liked Norse superstitions. They were much more interesting than the ones shoved down kids’ throats in America. 

His mind drifted to the one-armed kid without meaning to, and he shoved it away.

Even if he made him an arm, the kid would grow out of it, and then he’d be back in the same situation as before—only with a memory of what he’d had back again for a short while.

All the same, Tony set a program to searching for a one-armed kid under 10 in the right neighborhood, and set a mental note to make him an arm when he’d stopped growing.

By that time, too, he’d have a much better arm to offer the kid. Leg prosthetics are easier than arm and hands, at least in terms of utility—walking and running were vastly different than the dexterity required to pick up objects and _write_.

He was pleased with the concepts he’d gotten out on his four-day-inventing-spree, but he was a little bit far from cohesive, natural movement.

Howard thought his work in prosthetics was a waste of time—good for publicity, good for public relations, especially with the number of handicapped returning from the war, but not deserving of a whole department, let alone a whole branch of research.

Tony shook his head and wondered how he could see so much where his father saw so little.

Robotics and prosthetics would be working arm in arm, and Tony…

It hasn’t come up yet, but eventually…

Eventually Tony would have to put his signature on _something_.

And if everything turned out the way he wanted, he’d be able to do a lot more than just that.

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for lateness—Other stories, and also I only now finished my course. Huzzah! I passed! Also job.  
> I should be updating everything more over the summer, and I hope you enjoy this odd story :) I swear it’ll eventually tie in with Iron Man and whatnot.  
> So, Next chapter will probably have a bit of a time-lapse, or else just moving things forward quicker.  
> But hey. Hey guys. Do you see why I’m bringing up prosthetics so much now?  
> If you’re interested, there was a TED Talk on prosthetics that was freaking amazing, you should check it out. Look it up. Do it. You will have many types of feels, including but not limited to Engineering Feels.


	4. Junior

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Have to say, laughed a bit at the people PM-ing me about their hopes that Tony would give the kid an arm sooner rather than later. I dunno if I’ve made Tony more outwardly caring in this, but for the most part Tony is pretty darn practical in canon, at least in matters of building things.  
> That is all :) Thanks for all the support!

 

Things moved quickly—Tony would be very, very tempted to go find his little golden buddy if he thought any of the ideas that had run through his head could be his, but was more than sure that the ideas were his alone.

All were inklings he’d had tickling the back of his mind, whispering across the synapses of his brain, only somehow brought screaming to the forefront of his mind from what Tony presumed was an amazing power-nap.

Because the guy was the freaking Sandman, and quite a few of Tony's ideas were realized after crashing into dreamland for a few hours. Well, before he’d been electrocuted—huh.

Tony tried to remember the last time he’d actually slept, but the only thing that came to mind was the one he’d been forced into. Before that… was the idea that he’d slept before the testing, but only for a few hours, and wow, Tony hadn’t slept in years.

He grinned.

He was tempted to go bring this realization to Howard if only to brag that he didn’t have to recharge his body like that, but he was in one of his Captain America kicks.

The search for Captain Rogers was always on, always in the back of Howard Starks mind, but the intensity of his searching came and went like the tide; sometimes it was all he could focus on, sometimes he could allow the search teams on payroll to search uninterrupted.

Tony thinks that if he wasn’t in the picture, Stark Industries would be primarily a weapons factory; lucky for everyone, Tony’s interests varied. If he weren’t around, the only other thing that Stark Industries would be invested in would be oceanic exploration.

But because Tony _is_ around, they have a much larger research division. Weapons were still huge, and yes, Howard was the lead cheerleader in underwater exploration, but Tony still cranked out tech for appliances, prosthetics, robotics, and mechanical engineering, and a little bit of everything in-between…

Because Tony didn’t like tunnel vision, thought it was a waste, and as much as he looked like his father, as much as he ‘followed in his footsteps’, he actually _wasn’t_ Howard, and he was damn fine with that.

Besides, Howard had his private, not-for-public-viewing projects, and Tony had his own.

Because he has a freaking plan, because as much as he doesn’t care if people see him so long as they know he’s _there_ , so long as he can still do whatever the _hell_ he wants, he finds that he kind of misses people looking at him directly, being able to interact with him directly, and that’s where the prosthetics come in.

Because yeah, he’s doing good for other people, he’s making sure that people who’ve lost limbs or been born without them have an alternative, but c’mon—

Tony had lost _all of his limbs_.

And all of his organs.

And pretty much everything.

Except for his… brain. Spirit? Mentality? Consciousness?

Thing is, Tony’s not all gone, and he’d like limbs again.

And he has the means.

And he has an idea, because so far as he can tell he hasn’t physically aged in his non-physical being, he’s not sure if he’ll just reach 80 and keel over, never to be heard from again, so he’ll have to have a reason for him to be around in, say, 2030 or whatever. He also wasn’t fooled into thinking his parents were immortal—eventually, he was going to have to go to board meetings again (ugh), and probably physically so that he can sign things (more ugh), and actually run the company directly rather than through his dear old dad.

And he was getting _old_.

He wasn’t really old, not yet, but his hairline was receding, and he was getting bits of grey in his hair. Maria was as ageless as ever, and anyone who said differently had electrical malfunctions for weeks afterwards, never mind the bad press that followed them further still.

So Tony had to figure this out, the sooner the better.

So he started small. Very, very small, because if he could get the basics out in a small model body, then he could build in the details without worrying about size.

While he’s doing this, he also co-starts a mechanics foundation primarily directed at children with physical disabilities.

Should they get through high school with a certain GPA then they would be able to bring their marks to Stark Industries and get fitted out with prosthesis for one missing limb. This, he found, served two functions—for one, it made sure that these kids had a tangible reason to finish high school, and for another, the Foundation wasn’t limited to children.

Many, many people didn’t finish their high school education for one reason or another—war, disinterest, whatever it is, if you applied for it, Stark Industries would help fund your schooling if you needed it, and would offer help if you were having trouble.

Maria had been the one to bring that point up—Tony hadn’t ever had trouble in school, but some people left school to go to war because war was easier than school, and Tony knew that smart people could get bad grades simply because they weren’t being taught in the most productive way for their thought-process.

So they had to set up a few centers for the wave of war vets who wanted the education—wanted the prosthetic limb offered, even if it was just the one—because war vets in high schools made the parents a bit nervous, shockingly.

But, he conceded, the Foundation also meant that the one-armed dreamer could still possibly get his arm… so long as he worked at it. Tony thought it was a good strategy. He took the kids dream, and showed him how he could achieve it—while also giving other people the chance at it as well.

Of course they had to set up a scholarship program for people without handicaps; instead an approximate value scholarship directed to whichever university or collage they were interested in applying to, but Stark Industries was more than well off.

And besides, it was great publicity.

Tony would’ve let Maria take credit for it if she hadn’t insisted attaching his name alongside hers, and though it meant that the papers sometimes tried playing Howard and Tony against each other (this time making Tony more charitable and caring than Howard, rather than simply the ‘newer and better model’), there was a lot of people getting educations they wouldn’t have gotten before.

And Tony didn’t much care but…

Well. It was one less thing for him to think about.

And probably the most public part of his ongoing plan, as most of his developments in the oncoming years would have to be intensely private to keep people from linking his research with his eventual public appearance.

It was all a matter of time, now.

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

It’s 1963 when he has his base model figured out—and Tony can control it with minimal thought, which is good, but the movement is awkward and obviously robotic.

Good place to start though.

It’s not until 1964 that he has a better body model with some sort of reaction time, and that launches him into several other adaptations that means by 1970 he’s not only got the delicate machinery required for the thousand-and-one facial queue’s required for human expression, he’s also got a fairly decent synthetic skin being designed. That, at least, he shared with the rest of his development team.

He accidentally knocks one of the Lab technicians in ~~through~~ the head (something he got used to, being gesture-happy and invisible) and the resulting ideas push the synthetic skin’s quality forward several years.

By 1972 he has enough to bring Maria and Howard into his plans… and their reactions are both better and worse than he’d expected.

“You’re… going to have a fake baby. With yourself. And you’re going to be the baby.”

Tony huffed. “Well, when you put it like that…”

“And… and what will you be doing as yourself when you’re…” Maria trailed off, and Tony didn’t blame her. The tenses in this conversation were going to be insane.

“Let’s just say there’ll be me, and baby me. I figure I can still be me until baby-me is kid-me and would require more focus on what’s going on, and then… Well. Depending on you two… I figure a heart attack wouldn’t be out of the question for me.”  
“Depending on us? How does that figure? It’s—oh, right, the media.” Howard shook his head, as if the very concept of the media was a bother, and bent to the exposed robotics of Tony’s mini-me project. Maria’s hand went to her mouth, and Tony scooted the converted remote-controlled-car-come-tissue-dispenser towards her—and as ever, the little contraption he’d made in the wee hours prompted a small smile, if not outright laughter.

“Mom, I know it’s not something you’ll want to think of, but this won’t be happening for a long while. Programming and fine-tuning won’t be finished until, mm, 1980… If it is done, I might leave it to 1981, because really, birthdays right _on_ the decade are a bit weird if you ask me. Ugh, and can you imagine being born on a _centennial_? That would be _awful_. Ugh. Anyway, I’m assuming you still have my body?”

Maria blinked at the subject change, and sniffled delicately.

“Cremated, urn on top of the fireplace.”

Tony blinked, and thought back to the main living room. Was there…? Yes, he vaguely recalled an urn on the fireplace. Weird. His remains were in an urn. He’d passed it a few _thousand_ times and hadn’t known.

For some reason he’d assumed he would recognize, or somehow _sense_ when his body was near, but now that he was actively thinking about it, he realized that that wouldn’t make any kind of sense.

Not that his whole dead-not-dead situation is at all logical, but…

He shook his head, and tried to stay focused on ironing out a few details, figuring what would be needed in a few short years… but his mind kept drifting to the fireplace two rooms over.

He was less than 50 feet away from his cremated body, talking with his parents about faking his death, and it was just…

Heavy, heavy thinking.

He didn’t like it.

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

Maria came down to his workspace more often, now, and was a fount of knowledge.

Tony had been focusing on realistic expression and reaction time, but Maria had raised him.

She knew more about kids and their movements and how much Tony had grown (and therefore the likely growth-spurts his little duplicate would have), and though she still remembered to get her own meals and attempted to remind Howard, now there was a dining table in his workshop for them to eat and talk at the same time.

Tony hadn’t realized he’d missed this until then—he didn’t need to eat or sleep, he had no biologically functioning body, and that meant quite a bit of his mothers interactions with him were cut short when he was working.

She brought him pictures of himself at varying ages, and let him know when he’d had growth spurts, at what point he’d started to lose the baby fat around his face, when he’d lost all of his baby teeth…

And she’d also given him a crash course on how children act.

He recorded these lessons so that he could remember—he hadn’t been like the other kids when he was one himself, and he couldn’t keep looking to Maria once mini-Tony is in place. He couldn’t just look at how kids around him acted, because, from what Maria was telling him, where other kids whined, Tony plotted. Where other kids attacked by shoving and kicking, Tony bit and emotionally scarred.

Where other kids were stupid, Tony was also stupid, but at least he went about being stupid as a _genius_.

If that made even a lick of sense.

Tony didn’t know.

What he did know was that the years flew, and preparations were made.

To the Press he was Anthony Stark, to the Tabloids he was Anthony ‘Tony’ Stark, and by the late 1980’s the rumors weren’t about Tony Stark sneaking strange women into his wing of the mansion, they were about Anthony Stark.

The baby and toddler bodies were simple to make after finishing the layout of his age-5 body; soft with synthetic skin and clumsy the way children were most charming. Ideally there wouldn’t be need for them as he’d cultivated his hermit-like attitude carefully, but it would be good to have.

Maria took pictures to ‘leak’ to the press in the future.

Howard was dismissive but had agreed to play along… Obadiah Stane seemed like a good business partner so far, but no one was eager to see Stark Industries in the hands of an outsider.

Tony thought that, if Jarvis had a head for politics, he’d be willing to let him take over the business for a while. He was close. He knew Tony’s little secret. He could stand up to Tony.

He was Tony’s friend.

It was nice.

Jarvis says just the right things to encourage the thought that Tony was entertaining a mystery woman more and more often, vague wording and pointed ‘no comment’s better than any blurry picture.

August of 1980 has the Stark household working on last-minute details.

A fake birth record is ready, a fake tragic family history is made for a delicate, fake woman.

A fake marriage, set for that October.

A screen press-conference is set for June, a now somewhat common occurrence.

Tony makes up a digital-bundle to ‘carry’ through the screen, soft baby noises set to the background, and grins out at the expectant faces.

“So, best get to the point quickly before he wakes up, this little guy is Anthony Stark Junior. He was born on May 29th—yep, same as me, the kid knows a good date—and he’s my son.”

There is a moment of silence as 44-year old genius recluse Anthony Stark introduces the bundle in his arms—

As he introduces his fake mini-self—

And then the whole world goes insane.

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, hopefully not too rushed-feeling. But I had to get the ball rolling, so think of this chapter as a steep hill in plot valley.  
> Edit to those who didn’t feel like rereading the previous chapter—I accidentally write that last chapter was 1937. It’s 1962. Tony was ‘born’ 1937. So.  
> Hope you liked that, and hopefully not as rushed as I think it sounds…  
> Thanks for reading :)


	5. To Be Seen

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yay for all the people!   
> Sorry for delay, and question for you all: Who of the Rise Of The Guardians Spirits would you like Tony to interact with next? Letting you know he will probably meet all of them in the retelling of Iron Man 2 (maybe, this is speculation), but I’m not sure who I should focus on next. Suggestions?  
> That is all :) Thanks for all the support!

“Mr. Stark, what does this mean for your retreat from the public eye?”

“Well, I wouldn’t call it that—otherwise I wouldn’t appear in front of you, now would I? As I’ve said, I am simply less comfortable away from home. And this little guy means a lot, but not so much in that regard… he’ll be going to school when he’s ready for it, and that’s all. Next question—You. Red sweater.”

“What about the mother? Who, and where is she in all this?”

“I regret to say that Sally didn’t make it through the birth. This past week has been a mix of celebrating the birth of my son, and also mourning the death of my wife—yes, we got secret married, settle down already, are you really all that surprised? She appreciates—ed, appreciat _ed_ being away from the public as much as I do—and the first person to ask prying questions about her will be to blame for this whole shebang to be cut short. It’s been too busy to mourn her properly, and it’s a lot easier turning it into anger at someone—that being said, you don’t want the co-head of Stark Industries angry at you. I should also mention you also don’t want the co-head of Stark Industries angry at someone on your payroll, either. Just saying, no further comment on that. Next! You, in the flowery blouse.”

“Is the mo—um, I mean, what prompted you to name your son Tony?”

“Simple. I like the name. And lately I’ve been more of an ‘Anthony’ than a ‘Tony’, so there’ll be none of that calling him ‘Junior’ bullshhhhh no swearing in front of the baby, right. So, Anthony Junior on paper, but seeing it IN any papers will be really annoying. Really. Next question. You, in the green bowler hat.”

“How is the rest of your family taking it all? Your and your wife’s?”

“My parents are happy little Tony here was born, all five fingers and toes and a set of healthy, _healthy_ lungs, and Sally has no other family. Hah, thought I wouldn’t answer that? Well I did, and now thanks to you I can end this here, now, before this little guy wakes up. Oh, before I forget, what agency are you with? Nevermind, I’ll be able to find out easily enough. And before I leave, if you want any information on this little guy here you may call this number—yeah, I know, giant screen and I use it like one of those ‘call now to receive your free whatever-you-call-it’s—and, as ever, for those who are planning on coming directly to the mansion for your quote, I’d like to take the chance to say that Stark Industries is now not only the premier provider of firearms in the US, but now also in home security! Further information can be found through contacting Stark Industries’ PR offices. I’d thank you all for coming, except I’m the one doing you a favour, so. Good night.”

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

Once again things moved quickly—and to Tony’s delight, even faster than before.

Maria digs up some pictures of Tony when he was much younger, ones appropriate for the press, and ‘leaks’ them to the press when appropriate.

Baby things move through the mansion in a cycle, the cost hardly a dip in the funding Tony has laying around in his personal accounts, and then there are little and large shirts and pants specially ordered to fit his mini-self-bot, for when the time came, and when it did it was beautiful.

Though he felt a bit creepy about it, when Maria and he and his bot head to the various pre-schools to interview—to make a show of finding the best school for Young Tony, though invariably it would turn to ‘hiring’ a personal tutor—and studies what the children in the school _do_.

Body language, he finds, is the one thing that Maria can’t seem to direct him in. Kids are twitchy, bendy, all elastic-faced, but how does that translate in a schools environment where they’re expected to learn to sit _still_?

It helps, he thinks, that the schools they’re looking at are filled with privileged brats, ones used to being told by mommy and daddy to sit-still-and-stop-slouching. Each kid has his or her quirks, ways of sitting, fiddly-tappy-squirmy things they do when bored, but Tony sees enough that what Maria has been trying to tell him finally gets through. What this is, is basically that children don’t really stop moving, the only state of rest you’ll find them in is one that still has a foot kicking blankets, an arm unconsciously directing thumb to mouth. Machines don’t do that. He practices in these interviews, under the eyes of people around children all day; has his head on a swivel while looking about as if he had blinders on, decides carrying over his own twitchy hands to his child-self is a safe enough fiddly-bit…

He needs to work on the swivel of the hips, as he hadn’t factored in all the shifting-while-sitting thing kids do, and as interesting as the challenge presented to him in a child’s stomping run was, he wasn’t going to be able to modify the whole body structure to be able to withstand that sort of… _toddling_ about.

All in all, very informative six meetings.

The press had a veritable field day poking and prodding at the number— _six, can you imagine?_ — when a well-compensated tutor is hired.

Matilda _call-me-Matty_ Carter is Aunt Peggy’s niece, and needs the money to finish her masters degree in nuclear physics, so once it’s established that Tony is a ‘special case’ it’s agreed that she’d be able to help him more than the regular tutor.

She sets him increasingly more complex (but not actually difficult, for him) things to do, Tony does them when Jarvis reminds him, and for the most part he’s free to tinker out-of-body while also practicing using the least attention through his bot-self while still appearing a normal little boy.

It was tiring, and a bit weird getting used to books, hard paperback _books_ , again but meant that, several extensions to the torso, legs, and arms later, he has a much better body to use for the actual schooling Tony will have to go through.

There’s a storage bunker that sinks into the concrete ground of his workspace that he mostly uses for junk, but clears out now to put the now-defunct body of him ages 5-9, and he-as-Tony had one ‘year’ of study with him-as-Anthony, tutor-less, before he had to do the whole middle-and-high-school shtick.

He thinks he’ll need 2 years, 3 tops, to get through _that_ bullshit, and another 2 years to get an engineering degree if he uses his summers right.

It’s not that he didn’t see the usefulness of schooling—he co-founded a whole _foundation_ to get people back in school and taking it seriously!—but he’d already _had_ school. He’d skipped the whole college thing, sure, but most of what engineering students were studying was _his_ work. They were reverse engineering  and fiddling with _his tech_ —and he couldn’t be happier for them, but he had his own public death to finalize for the next year! He could let ‘old plans and research’ surface only for so long before he’d have to delegate inventions elsewhere—if it wouldn’t insult the both of them so badly, he’d suggest Howard take credit.

But the plan for him to die when his bot-self was young kept being pushed back, and pushed back—Obadiah Stane was good, really good, but Tony had found the pokes and prods he’d given Tony’s shares of Stark Industries—Stane wanted more, and in any other situation he’d applaud the drive it takes to try and take a company from it’s founder…

But he’d used the last four years to make sure he could comfortably, without fear of having things second-guessed, will everything of his to himself. His workspace, his shares—everything. Stane could continue being a friend to Howard, could continue helping with business, but he wasn’t getting Tony’s share majority.

Tony liked the guy, but not _that_ much.

He had a will drawn up, a video backing it, and jumped through all the hoops needed with his lawyers to make it so. Rumors of doctors making their way into the mansion—and Howard and Maria appearing the peak of health—was all that was needed beyond that.

Then Maria brings up a problem.

“What about food?”

He blinks at her.

“What about food? It’s food. What do I need to know about food—”

“People eat food, Tony.”

“Yeah, and—oh. Shit.”

“Language.”

“Shoot.”

“Better.”

But now instead of having a year to fiddle around solely with the more interesting modifications he’d been interested in, he had roughly 7 months until the boarding school he’d set himself up for would be open…

As he set to working on the how-can-a-robot-eat-human-food problem, he found himself debating his choice for a boarding school yet again.

He’d already started setting up the foundation for the rest of the world to accept his smarts—as if they could do anything less—by having him as Tony-bot be the named creator of a few less complex projects he’d been working on, as he’d done the same when he was _actually_ a kid… but he’d been out of the public eye for too long. He as himself, and also as his own kid.

 If he was home schooled for middle and high school, then any and all efforts towards a fully functioning robotic body for himself would be rather wasteful. The thing about having him be the one to control the reactions and robotics himself is that there’s actually no programming. If he’d put in all the hardware required for programmed movement, then the whole thing would be _huge_.

And aside from that, there was also the fact that as convenient as it was for Tony to be a known recluse now, for future-him it would be more of a hindrance. He’d gotten by so far with interactions with the outside world with walks and by acting the somewhat sullen child at the various functions Maria (and sometimes Howard) went through, gave the press their sometimes bad for PR quotes that he’d be able to get away with since he was a ‘kid’, but if he stayed at home then he’d forever be—funnily enough—riding on his own coattails. So; school.

Specifically, boarding school.

Tony HAD gotten his own room, both because he needed the room for his tech and generators and also because he didn’t want to deal with the possibility of a snot-nosed brat in his space.

He hadn’t shared space well _before_ he died, and now he’d gotten used to having his privacy.

The food thing wasn’t as much of a problem as he’d feared it might be—and for it, he’d figured out a way to not only keep up body temperature but also convert what food he did have into energy. He reinforced the pseudo-stomach and encased it in steel to protect the rest of his tech from possible rips, and set it to testing.

The stares he got in testing had him cracking up—the fake-saliva he’d used in the mouth needed to be a different compound, sure, but even though the tea-cookie-thing he’d grabbed from Maria’s table turned to a crummy paste over his teeth, he could just about taste it when it was slowly dissolved and converted to energy.

An hour later he found out  that not all of what he ‘ate’ was converted to energy, and so along with having to eat, he now had to adjust so that he can dispose of waste—which was annoying after so many years of not having to bow to bodily needs, but a silent alert to let him know when he needs to head to the toilet means that he also won’t have to deal with any questions as to why no one ever sees him head to the washroom.

He’s got two more months to fix up anything else he can think of before he’d be too far away from his lab to make any more adjustments—at least not until he returned for the holidays.

Hair—a synthetic material that should ‘naturally’ grow with regular contact with his specially made shampoo combined with water.

Bodily functions—he can spit, he can eat without having food stick all over his teeth, and he can poop—sort of. He’s expelling waste. He can do that.

Maneuverability—he can run, hop, skip, jump, and pretty much anything else a tween can do (and more that he has to remember that people in general can’t do), and he’s got all the materials needed for repairs and minor tweaks for when they inevitably come up.

Aaaand music.

He chose a good time to be ‘reborn’, as it had coincided with the forming of Metallica—he was used to working with only the sounds of machinery around him, but the Ramones, ACDC, and now Metallica to name a few, blasting them while he worked was the perfect blend of white noise and lyrical brilliance to keep him going at speed.

His workspace was soundproofed, with an automated tracker on Jarvis’s key ring to lower the volume when he had to enter, but having the music wash over him was…

Pretty damn good.

He’d say perfect, but there’s no such thing, not when there’s always more to do.

Happily enough, there’s not much more he needs to work on for his first consistent interaction with not-family, with those not-in-the-know, and he was feeling pretty damn good about how things were going.

And then Aunt Peggy has a heart attack.

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

She lives, which is good, and though she’s 73 she’ll live to see 1993 and beyond, but it’s a scare and also makes Tony realize that not only is Maria the same age as Aunt Peg, but Howard is _two years older_.

It’s—wow, _Tony_ is partway through his _fifties_ , too.

That rocks him back on his heels, and makes him feel like more than just a little bit of a creeper for going to school with sixth-graders.

But still—wow. He’d been dead 30+ years, and was he really going to do this again? Was he really going to randomly pay attention to the time and measure how long he’s been dead for?

He supposes it’s wise, for when he inevitably dies, so he can have fair warning for getting his affairs in order. Better than conking out dead because he was too busy modifying something to notice he was 90-something, and hit his spiritual end-point.

It was all just very strange.

That strangeness carried with him through the first few months of middle-school, and could be conveniently explained away by the scare with Aunt Peggy—but he only allows himself those few months.

He gets the lay of the boarding-school land, finds out what he needs to about all the teachers, and after the first semester requests to test his way through middle school.

Denied, with a probably not meant to be noted comment about not being able to buy his way through school, and that’s when Tony decides to get vicious.

When he was a kid he hadn’t actually had to deal with this shit—there was the war, and Stark Industries wasn’t even a thought in his dad’s head.

Tony had finished High school when he was 15—he wasn’t about to let some assholes hold him back because they were afraid letting a legitimate genius graduate early would be considered favoritism.

Hell, this was the reason Tony had chosen a boarding school they _hadn’t_ donated obscene amounts of money to.

It’s frustrating—doubly so in that Tony can’t even act out because of it, as he’d have to show ‘maturity’ for his parents to be able to step in to have him moved forward—

It would have made things easier last time.

Maria gets things sorted out, and that means that he’s in high school by the time he’s 13; not as quick as he’d imagined things being, but pretty darn good, considering.

In that time he’s made several adjustments to his bot-body, has been hailed as several tabloids’ most charming, and also showed off an upgrade to the display screen he’d made as Anthony as Tony. Things were confusing, tense-wise, and he felt more than a little mercenary for the thought but Aunt Peggy’s heart attack at least showed him how he should act when Tony-as-Anthony died of a heart attack.

Things were going slower than he’d hoped, but escalating fast enough for him to not bore himself to death. Really, if and when he did actually die, it would probably be due to boredom more than anything else.

The one thing he didn’t like was that Howard had been delving more and more of his time into Aunt Peggy’s name-confused organization. It had changed and shifted around its name so many times that Tony wasn’t going to dedicate the brain-space until they settled one way or another.

Tony was on friendly enough terms with them—as Anthony, because Tony was ‘too young’ to be on any terms with a largely militaristic world-spy unit thing that didn’t even have a proper name, never mind that Tony in real-time had worked with them in their baby-stages when he’d been _7_. Unofficial as it might have been. But he was friendly enough with them, and he was still in touch with Aunt Peggy (and she knew all about him, too, so that was convenient), but there were a lot of pomp and circumstance assholes in their higher ranks. Ones used to digging for information to use as weapons, and that translated to whole scores of men looking to get dirt on Tony-as-Anthony so he would have custom-made weapons, be the Quartermaster to their Double-Oh operations—

(good books, it was amusing to make up the tech Q handed out but it was all entirely ridiculous even if it spawned good ideas—)

But that wasn’t happening.

Howard being all buddy-buddy with them meant that they came into the house irregularly, which means that they brought spies with them—and Tony’s not being paranoid because that’s exactly what they _are_ , and they try to get into Tony’s _labs_ , they try to get information from the _maids_ , from _Jarvis_ —they tried to _pay Jarvis_ to spy on Tony since he was the one to politely and firmly redirect him away from lurking around the door leading to Tony’s work room!

Really, Tony hacked into their reports on him, they said he was a _paranoid genius with secretive impulses._

Coming from an organization of _spies_.

He thinks the thing he likes least about them is their hypocrisy.

Howard was focusing on everything but the family; when he wasn’t working with Obie (who he as young Tony seemed to be getting along with fine, thankfully) he was working with Aunt Peggy’s Name-Confused Organization, and if not them then he was working on finding Captain Rogers; Tony thought maybe that was why he was spending more time with the NCO. Maria was immersing herself in charities and art and general social gatherings-y things that Tony endured when he had a body, and when Tony was officially-with-body Home she made a point of displaying him to the world.

If he were anyone else, he would have bristled at it, but she was reintroducing him to the world; he would need to know these people, he needed to charm them so they would remember him so that when he needed the connections there would be a _point_ to remembering Miss Whatshername’s three sons and daughter, or That Guys dogs, or the rumor and gossip about _everyone_.

He didn’t like it, but he’d need it, and it made his mother happy, so.

Tony shakes his head and gets his things ready and locked down to be moved—he got another room to himself for the high-school campus, and it was best to get things all set up and ready before he ‘died’… there would be a mourning period, and luckily he’d be able to get away with violent grieving should any of the punk kids give him shit for his age—a real laugh, all things considered—but he couldn’t put off dying for much longer.

As he continued as his own son he’d have to put more thought into controlling his body, and, as he got closer to his actual height and body-type, he had plans eventually for him to be able to wear the bot like he walked through his display screen…

He could be two people when he was being a man and a toddler-child-being.

He could _not_ be both a man and a teenager.

Something would have to give.

Another reason crops up when he’s browsing the NCO’s databases for fun, picking up tidbits Aunt Peggy’d be interested in to keep up her apparent omniscience, because little bits of information spread out through their entire system point to a horrible, ridiculous and frustrating probably-going-to-happen-once-someone-gets-the-balls-to-voice-it plan.

Because Tony hasn’t been giving them ANY sort of an in; his systems are light-years ahead of theirs, they can’t get into his workspace, and they can’t get closer than a digital message to him—unless they try getting at Anthony Stark through Tony Stark.

They were going to try to use him against himself.

Unknowingly, yes, as it makes a fucked up kind of sense to use the son to get close to the father, but—just fuck.

He could not deal with that _and_ however-many years of high school bullshit.

He just couldn’t.

Maria is upset, Aunt Peggy is resigned to the inevitable, Jarvis concerned, and Howard mostly disinterested when Tony gives the death-due-date for that August.

Howard was understandably disinterested. The reason for the date was due to the work Howard had put into the arc reactor; he’d made some sort of mental leap while Tony was distracted, and it was brilliant—less than a month before it was completed, and that left another 2-3 weeks for Tony to iron out any issues with his death. Maria had wondered if he should do that, if he’d have enough time—but hel- _lo_ , Tony was great at ironing out wrinkly details, he was the _best_ —Just call him Iron Man. Oh ye of little faith.

There are many more people working on the arc reactor, but the design work is all Stark. Howard is visibly on-site while Tony is just about humming through the framework, specs flickering in front of his eyes and behind his eye-lids as he checks for any possible problems. There’ll be a non-conductive barrier between the arc reactor and everyone this time, but he’d prefer not to have any huge explosions this time around, especially as the body of the reactor was roughly twice as big.

Tony’s front-and-center when it’s being powered up, his younger body watching through a screen with Maria. Power builds and it feels like lightning up his spine, a slow shiver that made his hair stand on end in the most delicious way possible, and it keeps going, and going.

More and more power, energy sparking blue and clean and _safe_ , and this is going to work. Tony knows this with certainty. He can feel it in his bones, in the core of his very being, and he can’t contain the laugh that bursts from his mouth.

The dome of it fills with blue, beautiful power, and it feels like victory. This thing here, its predecessor had destroyed his body, nearly killed him and his family, and as the last flash of light builds up for the energy to stabilize, Tony just wants to shout success to the whole goddamn world!

Hands up and spread, Tony didn’t flinch at the last blinding flash of light, the white flag wagged by his previous failure, and it was _beautiful_.

He turned away from the glow of the reactor to grin up at Howard, behind the glass, and for the first time in years made eye contact.

People around him were clapping him on the back, shaking each others hands, but Howards eyes were wide and shocked and locked on him—Tony realized with a start that he was actually making direct, on-purpose eye contact. Another laugh bubbled out of him, because no one else was around to see, and waved to his dad.

Weakly, Howard raised a hand to wave back, before it fell limp to his side.

He wouldn’t hear him, not from this distance, and not through the glass, but Tony spread out his arms and grinned, “We did it… WE DID IT!”

And if he’d ever believed that Howard Stark didn’t feel a thing for him before, he certainly didn’t think it now, not with the way Howard was looking at him.

The last glow of the reactor behind him started to fade, stabilize, and the direct eye-contact that was maybe weird for how prolonged it was—except it wasn’t because he hasn’t made any sort of contact like this for years—was… degenerating. Instead of the steady brown of a focused Howard, his eyes were skipping to the side and back, and he was frowning, and it was a jolt to realize that this wasn’t Tony’s solve-all for being seen. Whatever got Howard to see Tony (and whatever it was wasn’t effecting any of the other engineers, certainly) wasn’t permanent—and Tony processed this in the two seconds it took for Howard to start frowning.

While he could still see him, Tony moved forward—very quickly, based on how Howards eyes jumped, and fazed through the glass to stand in front of his dad.

His eyes were wide, and he could still see him, and Tony put a hand on his shoulder.

When it actually made contact—and this startled Howard as much as it did Tony—he pulled him into a vey out-of-character hug, because he didn’t think he’d ever get the chance again, and wondered if anyone else was noticing Howard slightly leaning forward, if they could see the pressure-wrinkles in his suit.

“I know this is entirely out of character, but extraordinary circumstances and all that, but this is as good a time as any to say that no matter what else may happen, or has happened, and I hope you can still hear this as you’re getting glassy-eyed—I love you dad. Gah I’m getting sappy in old age, but we did it! It’s finished! And now we can do so much more! Fuck I have so many plans that’ll be plausible now that we have this, so many and oh you will love the submarine specs—”

“If you’re still talking I stopped hearing you five seconds ago.” Howard said, very quietly.

Tony’s eyes felt a bit prickly, and sent a quick message to his pager.

**I’m glad you could see and feel me even for a little bit.**

Howard huffed out a laugh when he checked it, and glanced around the room, through Tony.

“Yeah, me too.”

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

Tony doesn’t know if Howard told Maria about the temporary-visible-tangible-ness, but he’d kept quiet about it himself.

He didn’t know what happened, couldn’t make it work again, and until he could do that he didn’t want to get her hopes up with something that could possibly never happen again.

As it is, he doesn’t have the time to focus on that because August is upon them, the doctor who’d birthed Tony for real is there to give his signature to the right paperwork, and BAM he’s dead.

And then, once again, the whole world goes insane.

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bit of a sappy end, maybe, and yeah I’m a dork for some of the lines I put in this chapter…  
> Again, hope it doesn’t seem too rushed.   
> Will be more into the Iron Man movies next chapter, Rhodey will definitely be in the next chapter, aaand yeah I glossed over 13 years in one chapter :) Bah.   
> As I said in the top AN, who would you like to see Tony interact with from the RoTG ‘verse next? Sandy again? Tooth? Jack? What?  
> Thanks for reading :)


	6. Microwave

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally! It’s now ready to post! Wasn’t happy with the ending before, but then I added a thing, and now it’s better.  
> That is all :) Thanks for all the support!

 At the start of school, Tony gets a week to mourn, and several months after that to excuse ‘rowdy behavior’. It’s more than enough time for him to integrate himself into the high school, and decides that he must be a grief-worker.

It means that he can be as obstinate as he wants and bully the staff into letting him test out of ninth grade, and then tenth, but after that his drive is seen as ‘unhealthy’ as they assume he’s not sleeping in order to study ahead.

They’re right, of course, on the sleeping front. But he doesn’t need to sleep. So.

Classes are dull, but he gets top marks.

Math is dull.

English literature is dull.

Science is dull if only because all the interesting things a person COULD do with the chemicals on hand is off-limits and gets him yelled at by teachers.

(Teachers yell him at a _lot_ , because he does them anyway.)

The only class he’s allowed to—and even expected to—show off, at least somewhat, is computer science.

Through most of his classes Tony is actually physically in his room, door locked so he can work in peace. But when he’s working in his room, he’s working the way he’d grown accustomed; messing directly with the code, imputing data directly from his brain, only he can’t do that in the class.

So computer science was at least good for Tony to practice ‘showing his work’.

But otherwise… all completely boring. Useful, for sure, but boring.

Tony gets a room to himself because he can pay for it, and also for ‘security’ reasons.

No one within a hundred yards has the technological know-how to get past Tony’s security, but he has to put up the appearance, and it helps that he still cranks out tech every year.

That, he thinks, is also what helps him skip ahead again, so he’s in twelfth grade when he’s turning 14, and he wishes he could skip past to grade 13 but apparently even moving him ahead this far is only possible so long as he had regular visits to the student counselor.

So that blows.

Every Wednesday Tony has to sit in front of one Dr. Ethan Carter for an hour and show that he’s mentally stable and happy and whatever else he’s looking for—and Tony knows exactly what he needs to show, as he reads Carter’s notes over his shoulder as he writes them. He’d just hack his computer if the man actually typed anything up, but Tony wasn’t saying anything damaging, wasn’t giving away family secrets or gossip that any news rag would be interested in, so he mostly uses the hour as facial-queue training.

High school is all review and no-really-I’m-normal(ish) training, testing.

He figures out a better pH concentration for the digestive fluid in his ‘stomach’ that’ll better handle bread-stuffs rather than just being absorbed.

He figures out a better pseudo-skin for the inside of his mouth and on his tongue because hell yeah he’s a ladies man, and it takes half a thought to turn on the charm while he’s in his room inventing, cataloguing details while also getting a reputation. While also keeping the creepiness levels at a low, because, really.

He also starts working on possibly having a penis on his bot-body, because along with being a cleaner way of being rid of excess digestive fluid, he also wants to eventually have sex again.

Not now, because eugh, but…

He can feel things through what he makes, so long as he’s encased in it, and when he has that last ‘growth spurt’ or two he fully intends on actually wearing around his bot-body like a particularly advanced suit. He’d really, really like to make eye contact with someone—the time he’d looked Howard in the eye, been able to feel his shoulder, feel contact—he hadn’t thought himself particularly touch-starved, but he was. Contact-hungry.

And, you know, sex.

Not with teenagers, you know, because ugh, but he was already setting himself up so why not, and hey, he liked sex.

Sure, he hadn’t thought of it for a while, but _sex_.

It was going to happen.

It was a thing to look forward to.

Not anytime soon, again, because he wasn’t into underage, and he wasn’t going to get statutory-raped for research no matter that he isn’t actually a teenager, but it’ll happen at some point.

For grade 13—and really, the whole grade could be done with if some of the learning material was shifted around, some, but he could see the logic of it. Not everyone had an idea of what they’d like to do when they’re all grown up, and making them choose this early was bad enough.

So his final year (UGH he actually had to make it through the entire year, no graduating early) went pretty well, all things considered—

Except for one little bump, but he’d expected something like it to happen, at some point, but he’d expected it to be another student looking to make a buck.

Not a teacher.

Apparently during his therapy sessions he’d given Cater the impression that he was brilliant (obviously) but cocky, and therefore careless.

Brilliant enough to get a private room with a lock, careless enough not to put any other protection on his designs and ideas.

Or at least nothing that his computer science teacher couldn’t crack.

(Maybe Tony should learn the man’s name—naw)

Make no mistake, Tony was cocky, if only because his level of confidence on a kid could only be cockiness, but _careless_ …

If Tony _was_ that careless it would have worked, but as he isn’t, and as he’s usually connected to his system he notices when, during his mandatory counseling sessions, someone is trying to hack his computer system—

It’d be neat if he had a little device to go off and ‘alert’ him—or even to actually alert him to system break-ins, he’d have to look into that—but as it is he leaves his body to amuse Carter to get back to his room and check out who’s stupid enough to try messing with his stuff.

That it’s whatshisface is a surprise, but his muttering about ‘ _Carter keeping the little shit occupied_ ’ is a little insulting. And also a bit typical. When dealing with people trained to get into your head and feel likeable, there are only the two extremes—people you can trust, and people you can’t, and as a rule Tony _doesn’t_. It wasn’t personal, except when it was.

But it’s a bit insulting to think that all you had to do to steal from Tony Stark was distract him for an hour. HA! As if it’d only take Whatshisface an _hour_ to get through his firewalls. 

But Whatshisface is still muttering—conveniently reminding himself of the plan he and Carter had gotten together, so Tony quietly turns on his recording equipment around his room that he usually used to get multiple perspectives on the engines and whatnot usually taking up his floor space.

For another few minutes he amuses himself by dropping miscellaneous, useless data into Whatshisface’s coding, which made him more frustrated and mutter more, but that got boring quickly.

He was decent, at best, but nowhere near Tony’s level.

Even _if_ Tony had to manually type everything in, even if he relied only on what was _showing_ on a screen, Tony had several decades’ worth of experience on the guy.

So—bored. Bo _ring_.

He might as well be burning ants with a magnifying glass.

He doesn’t turn off his systems, but he does activate the emergency locks on his door, and then has a message take over every electrical screen he can get his not-so-tangible fingers on.

It takes 10 minutes for the principal to knock on Carter’s door, and Tony does his best to look surprised when he’s told that something has happened in his room but no one can get in—and whoever was inside couldn’t get out.

“Oh,” he says, “I guess someone was trying to hack my systems, then, and was stupid enough to close the door.”

“Pardon?” Tony shrugged, and led the way back to his rooms, talking all the while.

“Well I’m assuming here you weren’t just checking out if my room was locked for no reason, so my program worked—see, if anyone but me tries to get past my firewalls from my computer, there’s an electronic lock on my door to keep the asshole—sorry, the _culprit_ from getting away, and a message shown on any electronic screen within reach since, you know, I’m likely to see that.”

Nearing the door Tony unlocked it with a thought and it slammed open, Whatshisface stumbling out.

Tony blinked, and grinned—remembered that he’s supposed to keep in character, and affects an overly dramatic surprised look.

Whatshisface scowls.

(Eh, so his acting’s not so great.)

“What a surprise.”

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

So Carter and Whatshisface were being sued, and wouldn’t be returning to the school—Tony almost got in trouble for the whole electric locks thing, but hey, Tony had military-grade weapons schematics, had million-dollar inventions on his database, and besides, it worked.

Not much the school can say against that, especially since he didn’t employ any lethal StarkTech in his security.

The last stretch of the school year is finished with little issue, and while Tony is brilliant enough to graduate at 15, he’s annoyed he didn’t manage to finish all that AND University _at_ 15.

If he ends up having to have a kid with himself again, if that’s a thing that happens, he’ll do better next time.

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

He doesn’t push for a room to himself so much as he pushes for a dorm with a kitchen and attached bathroom. Boarding school dorms were large rooms with two beds in each—University dorms at least allowed separate rooms.

As he took the summer between high school and University as a time to work ahead and get out the required boring first-year courses, he’s at least moving through second-year work.

Considering the amount of money put into MIT, it’s a fairly decent set up.

His roommate is a second year student who he doesn’t bother remembering the name of, as the only thing he had going for him was the lack of gaping when Tony hauls his equipment—all of it—into his room.

And, except for the hundred-pound pieces he’d had a moving crew bring in before her got there, he does bring it all in _himself_.

He’s got loops and loops of wires hung on his arms and around his neck when he pauses to raise an eyebrow at his roomie.

“I wouldn’t suggest hanging out for the next three hours if you’re looking for quiet.”

“And what are you going to do for three hours?”

Tony grins.

“Security. You’re soon going to be in the most secure dorm room in the whole campus; enjoy it. It’s not every day you’re roomed with a genius billionaire.”

Shockingly, Roomie smirks.

“Not every day you get roomed with a cocky brat, either.”

“Not cocky when half of the first-year material is on tech you built yourself. Also, if you were worried about rooming with a Firstie, as soon as I test out of the first year programs…” Tony trailed off and waggled his eyebrows.

“Better keep up, otherwise a 16 year old will be passing you in class.”

Somehow Roomie only looks more amused.

“I’d be worried, except I finished most of my second year courses over the summer—I’ve got a few classes left, but next semester I’m doing all third year courses.” He smirked. “I’m not worried about keeping up.”

Tony blinked at him, and just to make sure he wasn’t rooming with a pathological liar, goes through his school records.

He lets himself grin, lets Roomie see it, because Tony knows he’s got enough personality to push people away, bowl them over; he knew this for a fact, as the ‘guide’ around campus hadn’t lasted even an hour before fleeing.

But Roomie was holding his own.

So far.

He drops the wires in his room, and turns back to Roomie. Holds out a hand.

“So. Tony Stark in case you’ve been living under a rock. And you, dearest Roomie?”

Roomie gives him a look, because Tony had brushed him aside earlier during introductions with a brisk ‘don’t care, move.’ But then, he _hadn’t_ cared before.

But Roomie took his hand anyway, gave it a firm shake.

“James Rhodes.”

Tony leaves his bot to grin and smile and return a firm handshake while he circles to get a good look at him.

Wasn’t exactly well to do, he knew from the background check, but dressed well, friendly, neat…

“Roomie James Rhodes, Roomie Rhodey, Rhodey my roomie. We’ll have a great couple of years together, I’m sure.” He claps his hands together, and jerks a thumb behind him at the kitchen.

“Along with my dazzling personality and dashing good looks,” he acknowledges Rhodey’s snort with a grin, “there will be many perks to living with the rich genius kid! One of which is the fridge—it’ll be full. Eat what you want from it, but it’ll always be full of organic, preservative free foodstuff.”

“Your body’s a temple, huh?”

Tony cocks his head and smirks.

“Oh, you have no idea how expensive this body is

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

He does test out of first year, but wrangling the various profs into letting him takes all the way to second semester—Rhodey’s lucky he’s such an amicable guy, otherwise he’d take all the laughing personally.

And Tony _does_ like Rhodey—for all that Tony’s well past his fifties, he doesn’t think he feels like it. And he’d never done the whole post secondary school education thing, so why not appreciate it?

And there was much to appreciate of the university experience with Rhodey acting as a door opener.

The food and the security had him amused but appreciative, but not appreciative enough not to argue about how appropriate it is to leave car parts on the table—that first time wasn’t a fluke, and it was refreshing to have someone around who wouldn’t roll over.

The people Rhodey introduced him to in the first few months, the parties he gets him into—they’re great for a given value of great, but the parties _Tony_ gets _Rhodey_ into…

Well there’s parties you can get into because you go to MIT, and there’s parties you can get into because you’re filthy stinkin’ rich.

And there’s no end to friends when you’re the young, ignorant rich kid with more money than you know what to do with.

He amuses himself (and, strangely, worries Rhodey) by letting Grads and Undergrads wheedle petty change out of him, get him drinks, get him ‘drunk’, get bragging little anecdotes out of him.

It’s funny. Because he can tell exactly who’ll blab to the press with these impressive little insights to his life, and it’s sweet that Rhodey’s trying to protect him, but…

The first time, when he finally gives in a little after midnight, allowing Rhodey to ‘drag’ his underage ass out…

As soon as they’re clear, as soon as they’re in the less populated walk back to the dorm, Tony straightened from his teetering slump and grinned at Rhodey.

“So, how did I do?”

Rhodey doesn’t gape at him, but does level him with a long, searching look. Tony continues grinning, keeps his bot grinning, and dances between the street lights.

Eventually, after a long, long stare, Rhodey shakes his head and grins the smallest, friendliest grin Tony’s ever seen.

“Your body’s a temple, huh?”

Tony buffs his nails on the sleeve of his Metallica shirt, examines them, and then gives Rhodey a ridiculously haughty look.

“As if I’d desecrate this fine piece of real estate with that _pig swill_ they call alcohol.”

He’s entirely unprepared for the arm Rhodey slings around his shoulders, and his bot almost falls to the ground in a fleshy-metallic heap before he catches himself. Rhodey shakes him for a playful moment in a headlock, and ruffles his hair.

“Man, you had me worried. How’d you fake drinking that much—I don’t even… know what? I don’t even wanna know.

“Next time, though,” he pointed a finger at him, “you better let me know when you are drinking, y’hear? You’re 16 and rich and the probability of me keeping you from booze is, is _infinitesimal_ , and I understand that. But we gotta figure out a code or something so I can look out for you, yeah?”

Tony laughs, thinking Rhodey and Jarvis—two peas in a very exclusive pod. Two mother hens in a coop, more like.

“We’ll figure something out—though I don’t know if I should be disappointed or impressed that you’re still using words like _probability_ and _infinitesimal_ when you’re this inebriated.”

Rhodey groaned.

“No more big words, Tone. And _no_ , don’t get your rich boy panties in a twist—you call me Rhodey. Do you know who calls me Rhodey?”

“Me? Your grandma?”

“Exactly—wait, what? No. You. Only now other people are, too, _Tone_.”

“Rhodey’s a great nickname. Stop complaining—that’s my job.”

“No, your job is being a dickhead. You’re the stupidest genius I’ve ever met, you know?”

“I’m also the _best_ genius you’ll ever know.”

Rhodey sighs like he can’t be bothered to argue that. Tony smirks. He really, really can’t.

“Well, at least you keep me fed—ow!”

Tony doesn’t feel the slightest bit bad about tripping Rhodey, not even when he stops to help him up.

“Damn right I do. I also fixed the microwave, and don’t you forget _that_ , either.”

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

Somehow getting in the word ‘Microwave’ into conversation is the signal to Rhodey that Tony plans on actually drinking at one of the hundred parties.

Tony never actually gets really drunk, because he enjoys parties more when he’s out of his bot and looking around the party areas, but a few times Tony allows himself to taste and _feel_ the hit of a shot of tequila, finds out what a Jägerbomb is like for the full student experience, and okay so maybe the whole not getting drunk thing only happens most of the time. 

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

It’s a brilliant, brilliant day when Tony figures out the right vocal modulation for the best sound in the world.

He sighs happily and heads to the kitchen for a smoothie. He can have solids and whatever, but smoothies—they’re just great.

He sighs a little, disappointed when he realizes that he’ finished off the rest of the pineapple and blueberries in his last smoothie, and heaves a deeper sigh because he really likes pineapples and blueberries in his smoothies. He may not need it, nutritionally, but it tasted good.

He adds a nectarine instead.

Rhodey looks at him oddly when he sighs with satisfaction over his smoothie, and continues staring at him, frowning.

Tony sighs in irritation and finishes his smoothie. And, when Rhodey continues to frown at him, he heaves a sigh and says, “What?”

Rhodey blinks.

“What happened? Are you okay?”

“What? Why wouldn’t I be okay? I’m amazing—well, obviously, I’m Tony Stark. But why wouldn’t I be?”

Rhodey looks a little relieved, but still a bit concerned.

“Because usually you can’t shut up, and you just left your inventing hovel without a word, made one of your stupid sweet smoothies without a word, _finished it,_ and just sat there. Without a word. Tony, you weren’t talking.”

Tony smirks, and because he can, _sighs_ and heads back to his _inventing hovel_.

If he weren’t making a point, and if he weren’t an asshole, he’d totally say something about his place of residence never being referred to as a _hovel_.

But since Rhodey only called it that for a verbal reaction…

“Tony? Tony! Seriously, is something up? Tony!”

He closes his door and turns on his music. Goes back to working on his AI.

Sighing is awesome.

Then he remembers that the shell of his helper robot was still on the table in the kitchen, and he sighs for a different reason entirely.

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

He’s in his final year with Rhodey ( _ha_!) and is three months away from finishing a double major in Mechanical Engineering and Business when literally the _last thing_ he thought would happen happens.

He’d say he should also be graduating with a third major in partying and another minor in manipulating the press, but he can’t… He _can’t_ …

It was a car crash.

Faulty breaks.

_Bull fucking shit._

A _Stark_ driving in a car with faulty breaks?

This was just, oh, he was just…

He was _pissed_.

Obie is the one to come to MIT to tell him, which he appreciates, he does, and if he would want anyone there to hear it with him he’d want it to be either Jarvis or Rhodey—

“Tone? Tony, what are you doing?”

He’d like to say he’s doing many, many thins at once—he’s double checking the police reports to make sure this isn’t some horrible joke, checking the street cameras because he needs to see it himself, and a hundred other things because he needs to know in every sense that they’re dead, that he’s not feeling this for a joke—

But what Rhodey probably wants to know is why Tony had started collecting up foodstuffs and the leftover pizza in the fridge, but he can’t answer when what he needs to do is get this stupid bot body where he can hide it so he can do what he _needs to do_.

“Tony…” Obie sounds suspicious, and for probably good reason.

“What… No, Tony, you can’t do this man, you can’t…”

Tony closes his door. Locks it.

He’s got the most secure dorm room in the whole of fucking America, and yeah he’s gonna fucking use it.

He puts his bot to sleep mode, with directives to eat and dispose of food as necessary until he indicates otherwise…

And the fuckers who arranged for his parents— _his_ fucking parents—to die in a car crash will know exactly who hit them when he _swan dives_ into the net.

People haven’t quite cottoned on to how much stays on the web after they delete it, or send it, or do anything with anything, and everything is made much easier by the fact that everyone puts everything into technology if they can.

Things are faxed, things are scanned, and Tony otherwise wouldn’t be able to get at some of these things, except he is _everywhere_.

Most of what he finds he finds illegally, but he’s got no fingerprints to leave behind, so he does it anyway.

He’s _Tony fucking Stark_ , so he does it anyway.

He finds payments, finds bank account details, finds e-mails, finds _written agreements_ scanned into private computers, faxed, and he soaks it all up.

It’s 1999, and it only takes Tony 36 hours to find the assholes who thought they could kill off his family.

Republic Oil & Gas.

Instead of going straight to the police, with their red and yellow tape, and their protocol, Tony utilizes his minor in Media Manipulation, and makes sure the proof and information gets to several nosey reporters.

Either in electronic mail or through it mysteriously appearing on their personal computers, he gets the information to them…

And then he _rips_ into Republic Oil  & Gas.

A great deal of business is stored digitally, now, and these assholes are going to regret it.

Making the bug is easy, and limiting it to Republic Oil & Gas… Well. It means that when they do get their systems up and running again… If they use their company name, or if any of the people responsible for _ordering a hit on his parents_ try anything on a computer… Well.

Because he knows not to blame a whole company on a few assholes, He makes sure that Stark Industries is ready to snatch up the people the inevitable downsize will squeeze out.

When he returns to his bot, h finds that he looks terrible.

Even with the preprogrammed movement, he’s got dust in his hair, and his hands are gross from food, and overall he needs to get his bot in for a wash.

He only gives Rhodey a small nod in the short distance between his room and the bathroom, and while he washes he catches up on what he’s missed while he’s busy.

There’s a few more conspiracy theories about what’ll happen once the year 2000 hits, Stark Industries stock is on the rise despite the tragedy, one of the reporters he’d contacted was looking like she was actually going to use the information, and Obie had sent him an electronic message about arranging his parents’ funeral.

When he leaves the bathroom in only a towel, Rhodey is still there.

Tony pauses, considers…

“Rhodey? Microwave.”

He’s not remotely sober enough for feelings like these.

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

What alcohol there was in the house gets decimated, mostly on Tony’s part.

It’s actually a lot of alcohol.

He fiddles with the insides of his helper robot, programs while grief rides him hard, and Rhodey lets him. He’s never considered figuring out a way for his bot to cry, so he’s dry eyed and very literally crying on the inside. Somehow it doesn’t make anything glitch.

It’s 3am and Rhodey is asleep on the couch after making Tony promise not to try and get more alcohol, or to leave in the state he’s in—

Tony’d smack him for thinking he’d keep a promise like that, except he’s in a daze of alcohol and technology and programming and god he hasn’t had alcohol like this in… in…

He squints at the innards of his helper bot, and basic math is hard.

He’s making a whole fucking AI, but basic math is just… ugh.

How old is he?

Tony Jr. is 18, he knows, because now he has to remember to vote—ugh.

But _Tony_ , Tony… Tony Howard Stark the first and only… _Tony Fucking Spark_ ….

He feels very old.

He is very old.

He’s 62. Since when did _that_ happen?

When was he going to _die_.

His ~~dead~~ parents were in their mid eighties when they were…

He’s not been properly drunk since before he died. And he’s had the body of his 20-year-old self for a really long time.

Like, really really.

He’s gone through 12 bot bodies in that time.

He types some more code, and stops, because…

Well. Because it’s done.

Wires are still spilling from its base like entrails, and it only had the base of its wheels attached—and even then it was being propped up enough that those didn’t make contact with anything.

But the stupid thing flexes its single arm, with it’s single camera, to look where its wheels should be. The bases are spinning.

It gives a confused sounding whir, either not understanding why it wasn’t moving, or confused as to why Tony hadn’t fixed it already.

Tony snorted, and tapped a finger on top of its camera.

It whirred again, and tilted into the tap, turning it into a pet.

Of course his first AI is all affectionate… He snorts again.

“…Dummy…”

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More death, I know. Psssh.  
> And I was hoping to get all the way up to Iron Man 1, but…  
> Another Guardian to be met next chapter, maybe two if I can fit both naturally, so look forward to that.  
> Sorry for not having any in this chap, but look! Rhodey!  
> Hope you enjoyed, and thanks for the support!  
> Edit: 13th year: Not sure if it's the same for the US (but I assume so, though I've been wrong about Canadian-American similarities before), but for a long while there were 13 grades in High School. I'm pretty sure it stopped before 1990... But now Grade 13 is a 'victory lap'.  
> Doing more research, I'm finding it's mostly common in Ontario and in some parts of Germany, so I guess either ignore it, or accept it as part of my 'verse?


	7. Somewhat Downward Spiral

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not as happy with this chap in some ways, more guardians probably in the next chapter, but mostly I’m focusing on the canon people in Tony’s life.  
> So.  
> Enjoy!

 

The funerals are beautiful and nothing like the fake one held for the Tony as Anthony Stark

His had been a simple affair, more of a memorial than anything, where people could say their part to an urn of his ashes… it had been interesting, in a really, really morbid way.

For his mother he had Lilacs put up everywhere, but for his father…

It wasn’t well known, but Howard Stark had a fondness for hydrangeas. That they changed colour as they aged, changed colour depending on what was present in the soil.

Tony could see some of the fascination; in how they could change pink with dolomitic lime, more _intensely_ without aluminum—how it would conversely turn blue with an _excess_ of aluminum in the soil.

That there was one strain of the plant that had _lime coloured petals_.

When he felt like he had the time, Howard had fiddled with growing the things; changing the pH of the soil, adding more alkaline soil to see if the colour would change in any other way.

Tony was never interested in growing them himself (even when he had a body), but it made him happy when his father had taken the time to tend these huge plants.

The lilacs were solid white, solid purple, solid pink and rose, fragrant and lovely and constant the way his mother had always been.

The hydrangeas were a mismatch of blue-purple-pink-white-lime and no two bunches were the same. Lime with hints of blue in some bunches, because of course Howard would like a plant that could come with green petals. They were as beautiful and random as his fathers mind could be, and they left the scent to the lilacs. Like Howard left most niceties to Maria.

He missed them, and hadn’t the mind to figure out tear ducts before the funeral, so the front page picture was of Obadiah with his hand on the shoulder of a stony-faced Tony, a bruising of flowers around them.

It is beautiful, and Tony watches from high above as his parents are lowered into the ground.

He died before them, and yet he still lived long enough to see them die.

The last time his parents had seen him alive and in the flesh, he was being electrified, cooked from the inside with his flesh peeling from his bones.

The last time he’d seen his parents alive and in the flesh, he’d been cheerfully waving them off as they headed to Long Island, before he was back to MIT.

What a fucking world.

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

He’s got one last full-body change over to do—not just a skin change, or adjusting the joints, but one last full body change.

One last chance to change posture, one last inch to get in, one last change to foot size (and other sizes), and while he can make subtle hardware changes later like he did with sensors just under his skin so he can react better when people touch him unexpectedly or try to hand him things…

This is the last chance for height, natural width, facial structure (to a degree), and overall shape.

Because Jarvis knows more about suits and how well things should fit, he goes off of his preferences for hips, waist, and leg to torso ratio.

Rhodey doesn’t get what makes Jarvis so pleased after that first awful month following the funeral, and Tony is tempted…

He thinks he’ll consider it again once Rhodey’s passed the initial testing for becoming a pilot, but he doesn’t want to rush into anything.

He asks Jarvis what he thinks about letting Rhodey in on The Secret.

Instead of saying yes immediately, like Tony half figured he’d do (considering Rhodey shifted his military career aspirations to the sky when Jarvis told of his stint with the RAF), he’s silent for a long moment.

“…I believe he can be trusted. But I would wait a while longer in case your decision has been affected by recent events.”

Tony sighs and thinks letting Jarvis In The Know was the best thing he’s ever done since dying. For _himself_ , he means.

He’s done a lot of other great stuff, no offence meant to Jarvis.

But it’s a slight adjustment based on the measurements Jarvis gives him, and Tony shifts the portions enough that he fits in the bot body directly.

He was half tempted to give himself another inch or two, except, parties aside, he prefers to walk around in his made skin. Eye contact with his actual eyes. Not have to constantly float to keep his walk steady.

Jarvis’s measurements are very close to his own.

When he tells him as such, Jarvis gives a bland look.

“Very good, sir.”

What a guy.

So he finishes his last body modification, puts off wondering how to tell Rhodey that he’s not as corporeal as he’s led people to believe, and gets used to running a company in a more… direct way.

He makes a face in the mirror because he can, smooth’s his hands down the fine fabric of the suit he’d recently had tailored, and tries not to sigh when Jarvis reminds him he’s an hour late to his next meeting.

It all kind of sucks.

Obie already has the meeting going when he gets there, gives him a fond look when Tony summarizes the meeting and gives his two cents—or rather, his two million, as he’d figured out the problem R&D was having on that one thing on the way over.

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

Because it’s expected, Tony goes into a tailspin before he shoots for the stars.

Well, no, that made it sound like he was doing it because it was what others expected of him, and that wasn’t the case.

No, he does it because things are finally stable enough for him to do it, and his _parents were fucking dead_. It also makes it sound like he does some sub-par inventing, and _pshaw_ like he did anything sub-par. Hence the optimum time for a tailspin.

He deserves to party, and get drunk, and have lots and lots of sex—yeah, that’s right. Sex.

 _Yeah_ he’d figured it out.

He can have sex now.

And it’s freaking _amazing_.

Of course it is, it’s _sex_.

It’s _Tony_ having sex.

If he thought Stark Industries could take the sort of attention it would get, he’d open a sex toy department, because _hell_ _yes_ his equipment’s the best. No complaints from anyone.

He plans for a few adjustments when he finds there are things he didn’t get to do when he was alive, and his current body isn’t quite _equipped_ to handle that sort of pounding (ha), but he very quickly gets a reputation.

Because his Mother isn’t there to take her spot, he has different arm candy on his arm at every Gala, one on each arm, and always leaves with one more person than he came in with.

Because his Father isn’t there to sigh at him, he goes to meetings with half a bottle of wine in his system, and goes through another bottle while it happens.

Because he’s still Tony Stark, he does these things and makes billions, often _because_ of it.

Youngest CEO of a fortune 500 company.

Obie is there to smooth ruffled feathers, to help pave the way Tony has been so helpfully leading the company along…

And he just can’t be bothered to care.

Can’t be bothered to care about how it’s just Jarvis and Aunt Peggy who knows about him, can’t be bothered to care that a boardroom of assholes don’t think he can run a company that _he’d fucking co-founded_ , can’t be bothered to care that innovative thinking is taking off around him, that there are things he’s _missing_ …

He feels like he’s running out of gas, that his power is running low, and feels _every goddamn year_ of his age in the body he doesn’t have.

What a fucking world.

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

Y2K is stupid.

Tony feels stupid, and that’s not ok.

But Y2K is even more stupid.

Because why the fuck didn’t he see the problem before it cropped up?

It’s just—ridiculous.

Rhodey needs to stop laughing before Tony changes his mind about that new plane design and exactly _whom_ he needs to test it out.

It wasn’t like _he’d_ seen it, either.

It takes a very long time to fix everything in Stark Industries, and even longer everywhere else. It gets him moving again. Faster, he means.

In the press conference following, when asked about how quickly Stark Industries reacted, Tony laughs a little.

“Well, you know there’s one saying Maria Stark was fond of, and it was something along the lines of, be the spark. You know, be the spark to start the fire; be the spark to start the car, all that jazz…” He grins and holds out his hands. Lets the titters from the assembled press die down.

“I guess you can just call me Tony Spark.”

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

Because the people at the tabloids are all assholes, that one quote is on the front of no less than seven newspapers and twice as many magazines.

Honestly, he’d said it with a half memory from another part of his life entirely, and now this?

The whole industry is made of assholes.

That one comic with him setting a car on fire was funny.

But still. Assholes.

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

Dummy, he finds, is one enthusiastic Helper Bot. Occasionally he even manages to be an _efficient_ one, when he doesn’t get distracted.

It takes two tweaks to his code before he gets over the joy of handing Tony tools (whether he needed them or not, or was even working on something physical), and a third to figure out why his learning capabilities weren’t working the way they were supposed to.

Apparently after ‘waking up’ and not being able to move, despite the programming and connections that informed him that he _should_ be able to roll around with relative freedom, Dummy had learned that between tasks—between learning tasks—he should check his wheels.

That takes up a lot of his attention.

Once that’s fixed, it only takes a little more patience than he’s used to giving, and Dummy is not only helpful, but useful too.

And he makes a mean smoothie.

Not anything he’d let anyone _else_ drink, but for _Tony_ …

Dummy had somehow understood that Tony was at least _partially_ mechanical, and reacted to him outside of his tech-suit bot-body (which was neat and entirely baffling), and somehow in the midst of learning all this he realizes it’s fine to put things like motor oil and gasoline in with bananas and pineapple.

It made fantastic flavors and textures, and the synthetic materials housing his tech could stand it, but it only took one heart attack inducing experience with Jarvis to make it clear that NO ONE accepted smoothies from Dummy. Not Jarvis, not Rhodey, not Obie, not any of the steady stream of assistants Obie was forcing on him in the futile hope Tony would eventually be on time… no one.

Not even when those assistants annoy him when they try to get into his lab.

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

Rhodey is all done up in uniform, and Tony doesn’t like it.

He knows his mother would have told him that he’d have to get used to sharing his toys _some day_ …

She’s not around to say it, but the words echo through the rooms anyway.

Once his place in Malibu is set up he’s getting the _fuck_ out of this house.

“Jarvis get in here! We’re doing the thing!”

He shouts it for Rhodey’s benefit, but also says it at a reasonable volume through the speaker system in the room he’s reading in. He may be an asshole, but he’s not _rude_.

Besides, Jarvis’ll know what _the thing_ is.

Dummy, who Tony really wants to get into a more enclosed space so he’d _stop knocking things over_ , the big goof, rolls over to give the hem of Rhodey’s jacket a small tug.

Rhodey is shaking his head, but since waking up to find a new roommate, has taken being prodded by a robot with amazing grace.

If it weren’t tooting his own horn too loud, he’d say they’d developed a great friendship. His AI could make friends.

Dummy had also completely deserved his name, [DUM-E “Dummy”] engraved with purpose on his insides.

Just, again, it had to be clear that smoothies weren’t to be taken. Ever. In any circumstance.

“Tone, c’mon I’ve got six,” he checks his watch, “no, _five_ hours until I’ve got to fly out, and unlike you I can’t pass off being more than an hour late. I can’t pass off being a _minute_ late. Because that’s how the _real_ world works, outside of Tonyland.”

Tony slouches further into the couch and makes a face at him. Pouts. Because Tonyland would be great and no one would want to leave it, and Rhodey knows it.

“Then why’d you show?”

“Well, for one because you wanted me here this goddamn early, and the fact that you’re awake for it means it must be important. For another because I’m still, stupidly, your friend.”

“ _Ha_! Joke’s on you, there _was_ no waking up! I didn’t sleep last night.”

Rhodey rakes fingers through his buzzed down hair, sighing.

It looks weird. Different.

Tony doesn’t like it.

“And I am entirely unsurprised. One day you’ll lose whatever makes you look fresh as daisies after handling your fucked up sleep schedule. Or,” he concedes, “you’ll patent it and share with the rest of the world.”

Tony batted his eyelashes coquettishly and blew him a kiss.

“Oh you sweet talker, you. Keep buttering me up like that and just _wait_ another two minutes, and you’ll find out exactly why I can’t get this patented. Besides, you know.” He gestures at himself with a languid stretch and gives him a slow, filthy grin.

Rhodey’s eyebrows rise.

“I’m getting let in on The Tony Secret, aren’t I?”

At Tony’s blank look, he rolls his eyes and drops to the couch opposite him.

“C’mon Tony, everyone and their grandmother knows that you have some sort of secret—you and your dad, before he passed away, because I don’t think anyone believed the whole _accident in the workplace turned hermit_ story. You’re as secretive as Anthony Sr. about your workshop, if not more. _And_ ,” Rhodey doesn’t let Jarvis’ entrance distract him; “I figured you’d tell me in your own time. Didn’t think it’d be now, but…” he shrugs.

Behind Rhodey, Jarvis raises one _amazingly_ communicative eyebrow. Tony raises his hands.

“Hey, I didn’t tell him anything yet, though it sounds like he has an idea. I don’t know how close that idea is, but there’s a reason I need you here for the explanation.” He raises an eyebrow at Rhodey and shakes his head. “You, my friend, have very little faith.”

“Tony, you once tried to convince me that you had made plans for a real life fucking Deathstar.”

“ _Tried_? I succeeded! And who’s _really_ to blame when _you_ believed _me_.”

“Tony, you made some crazy shit in our dorm room. You _accidentally_ make a bomb out of our _toaster_. _You_ are to blame. The really scary thing is that I think you could _actually_ build a Deathstar.”

Tony shook his head and waved that away, brushing the words off.

“Irrelevant! Look, Jarvis is here because I know you won’t believe me otherwise, but before _that_ I want to hear what you think my big secret is. C’mon, the Internet has come up with some crazy shit, I wanna hear how your theory compares.”

Rhodey sits forward and looks him straight in the eyes.

“You’re a mutant.”

Tony opens and closes him mouth, and even lets the action mirror on his Bot. Because _wow_.

Jarvis actually snorts.

“What? It _has_ to be some technobabble electrical thing. You know I’m all with mutant rights, so it’s not going to change what I think of you, and I’m really happy you feel comfortable enough to be hones—Tony. Tony stop looking at me like that. It’s either because I’m right, or because I’m wrong, but either way I could do without the disbelieving look. Tony.”

Tony shook his head and blew out a breath. Laughed a little, because _wow_. “You’re wrong, but that’s actually a possibility…”

At Rhodey’s flat look, Tony shook his head.

“No, no, no, I’m not screwing with you. Me being a mutant isn’t my secret, because I’m not a mutant, but that’s a possibility I hadn’t considered before, and I guess it is still, mmm, kind of possible? I guess?” He scrunched his nose. “Ugh, I’m going to have to learn molecular biology now… Professor X-somethingorother was making waves a while ago with his studies on mutants, right?” He waved his head and set a reminder for later, because he had five hours and counting to tell Rhodey that he was essentially and only kind of dead, and…

How was he planning on doing this again? Oh yeah.

He pulls off his shirt, because he still liked Metallica and didn’t want the shirt ruined even for something like this, and looks to Jarvis.

“Knife?”

Catches it with long practice, because it’s Jarvis who he trusts to sometimes help him with his updates, and kicks out a leg to block Rhodey when he lunges for the X-acto knife.

_“Tony don’t.”_

He stops, worry in every line of his body, so Tony kicks him back onto the couch.

“Rhodey, like I would actually _hurt_ myself. Just trust me for a minute, won’t ya? Jeez…”

He shook his head and then felt for that little ‘scar’ that was about an inch and a half above the left jut of his hip.

When he found the little irregularity he slid the point of the knife into it, ignoring the hitch in Rhodey’s breath, nudging the small sensor that’d loosen the synthetic skin of his torso.

Rhodey made a small sound, and yeah, now it probably looked like he was wearing a very well made skin suit—because he was. That was exactly what he was wearing.

And he knew exactly how weird it looked when the electrodes giving the skin on his arms elasticity were still on when the ones in his torso weren’t, as well as how squick-worthy it was to see the knife cleanly slide through the synthetic skin.

“ _Tony_ what are you—”

He conveniently cuts himself off the exact moment he registers the robotics, the _tech_ where internal organs should be, so he can focus on cutting a clean line up and over. The cleaner the cut, the easier it’d be to put together again.

He didn’t exactly use _glue_ to meld the pieces back together again, but unless he wanted lumps he had to be careful with how he fitted the pieces back together.

He reminded himself to give the good people working on synthetic skin and reparative gels for said skin a raise. They certainly deserved it, and not only because they were improving their pigment matching.

Great guys.

Tony thought he could get a tan with their next update.

Rhodey doesn’t so much gape as he expresses exactly how few words he had left to him, and because he could be thoughtful _,_ Tony waits him out. Lets him process. Absorb.

Realize that yes, that was grade-A technology inside his old dorm mate, beautiful wiring and polished steel, gorgeous circuitry—

“You’re a _cyborg_?”

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

Explaining things is not a thing Tony has had to do… for, well, a very long time.

As a kid he had no patience for people who couldn’t keep up, and he hardly had to explain things to his dad so it wasn’t an issue.

As he got older he had to explain things, at least a _bit_ , to R&D. Howard was usually the one who could get people interested and excited to donate money to his projects; Tony had been very, very good at the casually arrogant confidence needed to assure the public that Stark products were the _only_ products worth having.

Both he and Howard had little interest in socializing with the socialites, in schmoozing with the businessmen who only ever hired other people to do the work for them, but Tony was the one with the greater patience.

Not for explaining, no, what do you think this whole spiel is for? Keep up.

No, Tony had the patience and charisma needed to make sure that even if they hated him, they loved him, too. They _wanted_ him. Wanted his attention, scattered though it was, wanted his personal _time_ , as costly as it was.

And he could usually talk enough, be _impressive_ enough that he doesn’t have to tear apart his projects so stupid people can pretend they understand. So he _doesn’t_ trivialize his and a dozen other brilliant engineers’ work for a guy who only _just_ passed his Ivy League education.

He thinks this is part of the reason everyone was so shocked when he’d removed himself (though technically it’d been more like he’d _been removed_ ) from the public eye.

True, he could happily spend a full week in his workroom, _working_ , but he was still a social butterfly.

A social butterfly that didn’t like explaining things.

So while Rhodey sputtered, he left most of the explaining to Jarvis.

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

After his initial reaction

(“You’re a _cyborg_?”

“ _Please_ , with this much tech it’d be an android—though, no, with a human soul for lack of a better word, I suppose it’s kind of cyborg-ish.”

_“Tony.”_

“What? Details are important!”

“ _Tony_. You are a _robot_. This is not a secret, this is a _conspiracy theory come to life_.”

“I told you, you have no idea how expensive my body is.”)

Rhodey’s calm enough for Tony and Jarvis to explain.

Well, explain as much as they both understood.

And it’s mostly Jarvis.

Jarvis is clever in that he starts from when he was initially hired—being clear that he wasn’t altogether clear about what he was being hired _for_ —and goes from there.

The big reveal.

The nonchalance.

How much easier it was to clean up after Tony

“Wait, no body? Tony you don’t have a—oh my god, either your mom gave birth to a ghost, or you’re your own dad.” At his smug silence, Rhodey sighed and put his face in his hands.

“ _Tony_. Exactly how old are you?”

“I knew it! The romance is dead.” He swoons further into the couch.

_“Tony.”_

Rhodey peeks through his fingers to look at him, and Tony deliberately held his eyes before responding, “I was born 1937,” through the speaker next to the couch.

Rhodey jumps and curses.

Despite having a body now, there were still screens in every room, and accompanying speakers.

That reminds him…

Leaving his bot on the couch, he moved so he could put his face through one of the updated screens, and has his bot redirect Rhodey’s attention.

Grins when it makes him jump and swear again.  
“Yeah, I know, bet you didn’t think I had such a handsome mug—wait, no, you did, because my bot is the best.”

“Tony. Your _eyes_.”

Rhodey opens his mouth to say more, but apparently not everyone could take news of Tony’s ‘condition’ with as much grace as Jarvis. He supposed that was good to know. He didn’t think he’d be _telling_ anyone else, but then he hadn’t really planned on telling anyone before he’d met Rhodey.

Things could happen.

Rhodey closed his mouth.

Tony shrugged and flipped upside down with his head still in the screen, just because he could.

“Yeah, I don’t know about the light show, but I can edit it out if I focus.”

Rhodey blinked.

“Oh god Tony, that’s why—your da-you, _you_ stayed out of the public because you…”

He didn’t seem like he could actually say it—looked pretty pale, actually.

Jarvis pulled a glass of water out of… somewhere, and set it in front of Rhodey.

“You’ll have to say it sometime,” He says. “Sir has had plenty of time to move past any issue he’s had with his situation—if, indeed, he saw dying as anything more than a mild irritant.”

Rhodey snorted into his drink, a welcome change from the near catatonia, and Tony moved the tiny tissue-mobile from its dusty corner to Rhodey’s side.

He could be thoughtful like that.

“That’s the only part of this I can see as remotely possible. If he’s this much of a brat when he’s, god, when he’s _65_ , then it’s no wonder he’s stubborn enough to stick around if he… _died_ at what, 25?”

Tony shook his head.

“Nope. 20.”

Rhodey goes pale again.

“You died when you were 20?”

“Well, yeah.” Hadn’t he made that clear? Well, he probably couldn’t be blamed for missing the math of it all… He claps his hands on his cheeks and grins. “Died at 20 and kept the youthful visage—not that anyone can see it, not really. Though, thanks, I guess the lightning eyes make me look older. I suppose that’s good.” He makes a face. “It does get a little tiring being treated like a baby faced looby by people in the company you helped co-found before they were out of school. Not to say I won’t be flaunting good genes when I have to start aging my bot, but…” he shrugs. Raises a questioning eyebrow at the wondering look on Rhodey’s face.

“What? I know for a fact I don’t have anything on my face. As Jarvis mentioned earlier, I really don’t produce waste. Waste doesn’t stick to me.”

“You’re really not bothered by it, are you. Being dead.”

“Well, I’ve had 45 years to get over it—well, nearly, I’ve got a couple months left before… yeah. But this, this thing right here that we’re doing?” he gestures between them, “I couldn’t do that for a long while. We had screens because dad was already into programming, but getting screens to fit into every room… even when we were in a smaller house, it was really expensive. But needed, because otherwise I couldn’t talk to anyone. The last time I was seen or heard was when we got the arc reactor working—and I don’t know why. At all. I think it might’ve been because our first try killed me, but only dad could see me, so I don’t know…” He thinks on it a moment, and shakes his head.

“Know what? No, I don’t think I could be a mutant. Well, I could—but I don’t think I am. I mean, I think it’d get out a bit more if the moon tried to rename you after you reached your mutantness.”

“What?”

“You know, your mutantness, when you become a mutant. Anyway, I think that happens when you’re just starting to be a teenager, anyway, so—”

“The _moon_?”

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

The thing with the moon isn’t something he’s ever actually explained, so it’s news to Jarvis, too.

Both seem like they don’t quite believe him—which is fair, since he’d brought up the Tony Spark thing in front of the press, and they just wouldn’t let it go, but apparently something in the way he told it convinced them otherwise.

And thankfully, with an hour to spare, the questions slow. Which is good, because the few projects he’d been working on while talking would soon need to get some hands-on working, and Jarvis knew him well enough now to know when Tony wasn’t in the same room.

Impressive, considering.

But it seems like Rhodey has one last big question.

“Okay, so wait—who else knows? Jarvis, obviously, and your gran-your parents knew, and I’m guessing Stane, but is there anyone else?”

“huh? Obie doesn’t know, but Aunt Peggy knows, but that’s pretty much it. The In The Know Club is very selective.”

Rhodey give him a blank look he doesn’t know what to do with, but Jarvis seems to pick up on what the matter is.

“Mr. Stane hasn’t been informed. Wise, in my opinion, as his link to Sir is mostly business, rather than personal… Not to dismiss your personal relations.”

Back in his bot, Tony waves him off.

“Nah, I like Obie, and he’s been real supportive since the thing with Republic Oil and whatever, but Jarvis is right that he’s business driven…” he doesn’t let his expression darken with the thought that Obie’d tried to get controlling share of the company before.

He wasn’t so sure that Obie wouldn’t try to get the _whole_ company if he knew Tony didn’t have a body to keep hold of it.

So, no. Just no.

For the last hour of Rhodey being free of the Air Force, Tony steers conversation to better things, and amuses him with people he’s met, situations he’s been in…

Rhodey doesn’t believe him at first when he says he remembers meeting Captain Steven Rogers aka Captain America, until he reminds him that Tony spent the first decade of his life making trouble in barracks and war rooms.

He also doesn’t believe him when he tells him he met the freaking Sand Man, and saw Santa Clause, but by the end of the hour he’s got him half convinced, half roaring with laughter.

Tony sends Rhodey off laughing; the red silk handkerchief he’d given him, his eyelashes fluttering ‘ _to remember me by,_ ’ tucked in his breast pocket.

He’s still not comfortable with Rhodey going all militaristic, but at least as the guy who made most of the weapons Rhodey’ll be using, he knows that there won’t be any issues with sub-par machinery.

But he also knows that people are getting more and more innovative everywhere, all across the world, so he still worries.

Because if there’s one thing people are really good at, it’s finding new ways to blow each other up.

He ups the security on the weapons he’d designed so many years ago, in a sleep-induced burst of inspiration, and wonders if anyone would ever be sensible enough not to misuse them.

He scrunches his nose.

Ah.

Probably not.

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

There’s a nip in the air, but Tony keeps the hood down anyway. It’s a gorgeous day, leaves turning red and gold, and for a change the streets were mostly quiet.

He grinned for the few people who got over their shock enough to take pictures at red lights, but beyond that… well. He’s managed to escape from the office for a ‘test drive’ of one of the new convertibles. He knows it inside and out, knows it drives like a dream, but still.

You could never be too sure.

At the next stop light there’s a kid balancing precariously on one of the bike racks, spinning on the somewhat startling amount of frost that’d accumulated on it, and when he notices Tony looking at him from over his sunglasses—

The brat stuck his tongue out at him.

Tony snorts and sticks his out in return, laughs when the kid reels and needs to use the shepherd crook or whatever it was for balance. Scoffs, because really if the kid thought Tony Stark wouldn’t retaliate in kind, then he was more of a punk than the bleached white hair implied.

The light turned green.

“W-wait! You can see me!?”

To Tony’s credit, he only jerked the wheel a little when, with a huge gust of wind, the kid _falls_ into the passenger seat.

“ _Fucking Christ_ kid, I could have killed someone!”

At a glance, he saw that the kid was still staring wide-eyed at him, very full of wonder… he sighed, and felt more than a little bad that he’d be bursting this kids bubble very soon.

A quick consult with the satellites and he found an empty parking lot to pull into, the kid laughing when he made the car fishtail into a spin, slowing to a screeching stop directly within the yellow lines of the spot he was aiming for.

(So he wanted the kid to have some fun, so what?)

“Kid,” he starts off, before the white-haired spirit or whatever caught his breath, “I can see you, but not for the reason you think.” And then he left his bot body, and very firmly felt like the shittiest person alive for the utter look of disappointment in the kids eyes…

And that was how Tony Stark met Jack Frost.

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

Tony was much later than even he’d assumed he’d be getting back to the office, mostly due to the fact that Jack was _hilarious_ when he wasn’t having his biggest dream crushed—

 _So what_ if the kid had ruined the interior of the car when he realized that Tony couldn’t do the same robo-body for him that he’d figured out for himself?

Tony understood that, because he knew it was more helpless jealousy than absolute anger.

 _So what_ if, in the joyride following their little who-am-I-who-are-you + Frustration Fest, they nearly cause an accident with a combination of stunt-driving and black ice?

The thing is, they _didn’t_.

He’s great, though, and Tony gets a promise to meet up next time both of them are in not-Malibu (as if Malibu would ever get _snow_ , haha), and he thinks next time they meet up there’ll be less of that envious energy Jack couldn’t keep in.

And, because he thinks they’ll be somewhat more consistent company-wise for his lonely-seeming new acquaintance…

He suggests that Jack try interacting with the Sandman next time he sees him—“Because the guy doesn’t talk,” he explains—or smiling wide for one of the tooth fairies flying around… he does suggest he avoid touching them, since they might not actually be tropical bird, but most birds don’t do well with cold.

“Freak snow storm,” he tells the unhappy looking attendant to explain away the damp interior—and he isn’t even lying. The random bit of snow was already old news on the internet.

He grins all the way back to the house, and runs fingers across the old Norse mythology book he’d read so often as a kid.

Jack Frost or Jokul Frosti, the guy was _exactly_ as much fun as he’d imagined as a kid.

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

Jarvis is not fond of the Malibu House.

Jarvis is not fond of Malibu in general…

Jarvis is not fond of how Tony acts now that he lives in Malibu.

Tony thinks it’s this great combination of things that has Jarvis taking over looking for a PA for Tony.

It’s because no PA will be as good as Jarvis that Tony doesn’t make things easy on him.

The first two he sleeps with and ignores, and he’s late to every meeting Jarvis doesn’t make him go to, and the third is so incompetent that Tony goes easy on the fourth—he suspects this part was planned.

But #4 gets fired when he tries to get into Tony’s lab, and gets his credit ruined when he screams abuse at Dummy for being the worst robot ever…

Apparently when he couldn’t get in by his codes, the fact that Dummy had obeyed his _protocols_ rather than #4’s _orders_ made him a stupid hunk of scrap metal.

(aside from the name calling—because Tony’s the only one who’s allowed to do that—it’s actually a bit funny seeing the frustration on the guy’s face.)

#5 and 6 are hired at the same time with the thought that their combination of skills and nagging would get him to sign papers on time, and go to meetings only a little bit late, and it seems to be working—grudgingly, on Tony’s part, when one of them snaps.

#5 is sent to the hospital for her stab wound and mild concussion, and #6 is dragged out by police, the beginnings of a truly spectacular black eye blooming with colour.

Dummy whirrs happily when Tony gives him a pat on his uppermost joint, and he doesn’t even yell at him for leaving the workroom—#6 had deserved to be clocked, if he couldn’t handle the _shared_ responsibility as his PA.

And stabbing someone with a _pen_? Pssh.

He sends an update to Jarvis’ tablet prototype (working, but nowhere near ready for market), that the next PA should be able to competently use Stark Tech—no pens. No pencils.

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

Later, Jarvis sighs and muses aloud that the only people who seem to be competent as PA to Tony Stark happen to be violent, psychopathic, sociopathic, or hired killers. They mixed.

But then, with his charge skipping between nicknames like _Tony Spark_ and _the Merchant of Death_ …

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

He has no hope for PA #13.

He’s not superstitious, but 12 were chosen and discarded before this one. All found by Jarvis.

In the time it’s taken Jarvis to focus on finding him a PA, he’s started on the base programming for two other helper bot AI’s, while focusing on a third, more extensive AI. The plan is to hook it up to the house—actually to have it compatible to hook up to any program, and have the processing power to look after the house and do all the boring stuff Tony doesn’t want to do himself.

Where Dummy is a helper bot in the physical sense, he’s hoping this AI will be a helper bot in the intellectual sense.

Step aside Hal; there’d soon be a new player on the board.

He jokingly calls it Jarvis 2.0 once, and shortens it to just 2.0 when all it gets him is a raised eyebrow.

He thinks Jarvis is actually a bit flattered that he might name his see-all be-all AI after him. Though it’d be weird to have 2 Jarvis’s, so…

He shakes the thought off and ignores #13 where she’s clearing her throat pointedly at him, and continues fiddling with the soon-to-be prototype base for StarkTech smartphones.

She goes quiet, and he doesn’t do anything as obvious as snort, but he does feel vindicated with his lack of faith or whatever you wanted to call it.

He’d flirted with her earlier, and he’d given her props for only flushing a little bit before firmly turning him down, but all the other PA’s, no matter how good, bad, or psychotic, had all known to hound at him to get to meetings. To hound him and keep on hounding him until he finally acquiesced.

Thing is—he _knows_ he’s an hour and a half late to a meeting, he’s been tracking the notes made by the recording software he’d developed a few years ago. He knows when all of his meetings are, he knows the _when_ and _where_ of all the events he needs to go to, he knows… everything. He knows everything about what he needs to do, and when.

He wouldn’t need a PA at all… if he didn’t have a bad habit of burying himself in his work. Time worked differently when you didn’t have to sleep or eat.

The thing about setting up alerts and alarms for himself, is that it’s very easy to dismiss them with a half a thought when he’s working on something else.

An hour later, when Virginia Potts has still not hounded him for the meeting he’s now 2.5 hours late for, he looks up at where she’s responding to e-mails he can’t be bothered with and frowns.

“Don’t you have a job to do—namely hounding me to go to some meeting or whatever?”

She finishes the e-mail she’s working on and closes the laptop—she still wasn’t past her first-week probationary period, so no tablet for her quite yet.

“I don’t see why I should, Mr. Stark.”

“You don’t see why you should be doing your job?”

He sends a message to Jarvis that Ms. Potts wasn’t going to last the week, and continues fiddling with parts. Rhodey once told him that sometimes he’s almost disturbingly still, so now he consciously makes sure to fiddle with things when he’s sending out messages, focusing on other things.

He’d made the whole breathing-blinking thing automated, because it was boring counting out the time between beats and blinks, but otherwise it was all about the shifting and fiddling.

“I would, except you already have your recording program running; I’ve sent a message to Mr. Stane that you wouldn’t be making it to the meeting—or that if you changed your mind, you’d be there near the end—Mr. Stark?”

Tony had wheeled around on his stool, cheek in palm, to stare at her.  
Well—he was also checking her online history and what she’d had access to under her username and passcodes (limited though they are while under probation), but she wouldn’t be able to tell that.

“Recording program?” he asks, because none of the other PA’s had made any mention of it. Hadn’t noticed, as far as he could tell.

#13 purses her lips and gives him a somewhat unimpressed look. Just the right side of respectful…

“You told me to be familiar with the software listed to go into the, um, tablet—”

“Recording software wasn’t on the list.” He interrupts.

“No,” she replies, tone remarkably even, “but you also said to look over several other programs just in case you changed your mind.” She cocks an eyebrow.

“You mentioned you had a habit of changing your mind.”

“Hmm,” Tony says, tapping one finger on his pursed lips. “Hmm.”

“…Sir?”

The beginnings of nervousness slipped through in the word, like she was second guessing herself, like she was wondering if she’d done what she was allowed to do—Tony flapped his hands at her.

“No! No _Sir_! No _sirs_ , you were doing so well!”

“Pardon?”

“13, do you know how many PA’s have asked about the recording program?”

“Ah, thirteen?”

“What?” Tony blinked, “no, why would you think—oh, right, no, see you’re 13, you’re the 13th PA. No, the answer is exactly one; you. All my PA’s have the same probationary clearance as you have, but exactly 0 people before you have put one and one together to get the answer that I made a fucking recording software specifically made for meetings… no, no, no,” he got up, moved her laptop to one of the cluttered worktables, and pulled her hands apart from where they were clutched in front of her, wringing her fingers.

“C’mon, confidence even when you’re riding by the seat of your pants—or, you know, pencil skirt. You’ll learn everything eventually, but hey, you just called one of my bluffs—one that none of the 12 PA’s before you caught, might I remind you—and you need to keep the attitude.”

She blinked at him.

“76.”

He blinked back.

“What?”

“76. There were 76 PA’s before me. I’m the 77th.”

“What? No, there was... oh. No. You’re the 13th that Jarvis screened for. All the others were chosen by Obie or by the HR staff, and as competent as they are, they’re no Jarvis.”

“I—oh.”

“Exactly. Now I’m serious, 13—”

“Don’t call me 13.”

“—Virginia Potts, that’s a good start, but if you’re confident enough to go through the day in 5 inch heels, you’re confident enough not to wring your hands or tuck your chin.” He took a half-second to send a corrective e-mail to Jarvis, and raised an eyebrow at Ms. Potts. Virginia. Ginny? Potts?

“Any questions, now that you’re off probation?”

“I’ve still got—” she shook her head, cutting herself off. Good. She was learning. “What were you humming about earlier?”

“Hmm?”

“Yes, that.”

“Oh, I was trying to figure out a nickname for you. You don’t exactly have a nickname-able name, Virginia Potts, and ‘13’ isn’t a proper nickname, so…” he trailed off, raising an eyebrow. “Your court, Ms. Potts.”

Her smile, when it appears, is still this side of baffled and amused, but the fact that it appears at all is a good sign. He thinks.

“My name is Pepper Potts, Mr. Stark. I’m sure it’ll be a pleasure working with you.”

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

He dismisses, for a moment, the little birds he sees flying about one night—until he remembers that most birds don’t do that. Owls, certainly, but not… hummingbirds?

He stays still, searching for another flash of movement—there.

It takes a bit of doing, but he catches up with the tiny blur, tilts to see where the little thing had made it into a house… not a bird? Maybe. Maybe more. Or just different.

Keeping the little golden-mute Sandman in mind, he adjusts his eyes (always strange, but useful) to peer through the window.

It’s out of his sight for a moment, and then the little bird thing zips out from under the kids pillow, small tooth clutched in its tiny, tiny hands.

It seems as surprised as he is, pausing just outside the window to stare at him with tiny human-like magenta eyes—it should look creepy, but the colour compliments the rosy feathers around its eyes, the blue-green feathers that made up its body extra vibrant even in the dark. The light coming off his eyes bring out hints of gold in the little being’s body.

“Well aren’t you a gorgeous little thing,” he grins at the probably-Toothfairy. Winks one electricity-filled eye and chuckles when it makes a little _chirrup_ noise.

It startled and blushed a little—cute on such a tiny face—and looked away from his eyes to his mouth, gasping. It cooed for a moment at his mouth, tiny tooth clutched to its chest, then giggles and waves. Chirrups some more.

“Yeah,” he sighs, putting on dramatically dejected front, “a gorgeous being such as yourself is too busy for one such as me…” he casts the back of his hand to his forehead, allowing himself to drift backwards, grinning at the little squeaky laugh it garnered. Tooth fairies are cute little things.

(Girl? Boy? Transgender? Gender neutral? Agender or otherwise identified?)

Before he can react, the little thing darts forward and plants a kiss to his cheek, soft feathers brushing his jaw for a moment, before it darted away.

Brushing the spot softly with his fingers, then scratching a bit at the spot its little beak-nose had poked him, he smiled.

What a weird night.

Choosing a direction at random he headed off to find someone who was stuck or feeling uninspired to knock some sense into, feeling much happier that he had these weekly excursions.

He adjusted course, headed towards New Mexico once he remembered that there was a study happening there on Gamma radiation— he was entirely aware that the US Army was hoping to use it like some sort of Super Soldier Easy Bake Oven, but they were so far from human testing, and the studies on the radiation itself was interesting… well, Tony felt secure in checking it out.

Besides, he always got a little thrill out of snooping through military secrets—reminded him of his childhood.

Ah.

Good times.

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Probably not what you were hoping for with the Guardians, but they’ll be showing up later, and with more detail… but I already had explaining happening for Rhodey, and to have it again with Jack…  
> But I got Jack Frost and one of the Tooth Fairies in :)  
> And Pepper! And Rhodey again!  
> Yay!  
> Thanks for the support, and let me know what you think!


	8. More CAPITAL

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay! Next chapter tomorrow or day after tomorrow… probably tomorrow (She says, looking at the clock that now says 11:18pm)  
> Enjoy!

Chapter 8—More CAPITAL

 

So, interesting thing about Pepper is that she’s a hell of a lot more interested in the how-to’s of running a company than Tony is.

Which is great because between the two of them all of Tony’s responsibilities are dealt with, and Tony has a lot more time to tinker and experiment and have fun—

But it also means that he feels, a _little_ bit, like he should be finding her a better job position… only he doesn’t want to, because if he _has_ to have a personal assistant, it’s gonna be Pepper.

She’s great.

He likes her.

When Rhodey finally has a weekend away from his boring responsibilities, he’s sure he’ll like her, too.

He doesn’t understand how Obie and his father had missed her—she’d been in the secretarial pool almost directly under them for the past couple of years, almost immediately out of school, and no one had noticed her.

Hadn’t noticed for years that she was competent, smart, and just fucking _brilliant_.

Such a waste—but now Tony had her, so now she was only occasionally fetching him coffee (mostly as a bribe, so that really wasn’t on him), and was actually getting paid for the work she went to school for, wanted to do, and seemed to enjoy.

(So she was a bit weird. _Eh_.)

She was still on a special sort of probation, where Tony gave her a lot more freedom and apparent carte blanche on what and who made it past her own judgment to actually reach his attention… which didn’t sound like a probation at all, except the phone he’d set her up with had two numbers linked to it, one for private calls and one for company calls, and he listened in on every company call made.

(He had an alert set up for certain keywords that would hint towards giving away company and Tony-secrets…)

So far he approved of what she blocked with politely firm words, and all the meetings and department reviews he’d gone to were at the very least needed…

And she didn’t try to get him to go to the boring Let’s Just Repeat What Has Happened This Past Week meetings, even with Obie’s capital-D Disapproval.

So yeah, she’s a lot more interested in the running of the company, which was great, but not to say that Tony was letting her be all Power Behind The Name or whatever.

It just made things easier.

She seemed to take the odd things that Tony does as challenges, which was sometimes nice, sometimes funny, and very rarely annoying.

Like, she was in charge of making sure the Malibu House was stocked with food and seemed to have taken that to also mean she was in charge of making sure he ate—

But she’d also left quite a bit of that to Dummy, when he at one point gives her a shoddily written note for more of ‘the yellow.’

Banana’s.

He made a note to update the unit designations in Dummy’s vocabulary. Update the learning software, too.

That reminded Tony to tell her about the no-smoothies-from-Dummy rule, and prints out the contract agreement that she’d been warned about the smoothies and she couldn’t sue if she drinks one.

“How do you know he hasn’t put something hazardous in yours?”

Tony waggles his eyebrows from over the lip of his glass and downs the dregs of a banana, pineapple, blueberry, and antifreeze smoothie. She frowns disapprovingly, probably assuming some sort of alcohol based on the colour of the smoothie.

(Fair, but wrong.

Antifreeze gave an interesting buzz at the back of his throat, though.)

At a charity Gala, one of the supporter straps in his wrist snaps and he has to concentrate to make sure he doesn’t accidentally rotate his hand a full 360 degrees. It would probably rip his synthetic skin, and freak everyone out besides… but he was mostly worried about the uneven rips in the synth-skin. It’d be a bitch to fix up, hands being so finicky…

He wouldn’t have been all too annoyed if it hadn’t been some asshole from Hammer Industries shaking his hand to death for pictures, and slapping his business card in his hand—if it were possible to actually assault someone with a business card, this Hammer guy had it _down pat_.

It was ridiculous, and he couldn’t do much with his hand until he got back home, and on top of that the _fucking asshole_ put an absolutely miniscule recorder in the raised lettering.

He admired the design, sure, and he could appreciate some corporate espionage—Stark Industries had gone mostly without from his perspective, but knew that it had happened in his company at _some_ point—but it was just one more thing.

“I’ve decided,” he declares to Pepper once they get back into the car. “I don’t like people handing things to me. There will be no more handing things to me—except you, you can hand me things. And Dummy. Dummy can hand me things. But,” and here he pauses to pull a lighter from one of the side compartments, and sets Hammer’s card on fire, “no more bullshit like this.”

Pepper predictably panics about the burning card in his hand, in the car, but he shakes it out before it reaches his fingers, just so he could flick the ashes from the faint bits of metal swooping into an ornate Hamm- before it melded with the rest of the card.

He flicks it away and scowls when it lands in his glass of scotch.

That, he finds, is one of the easier quirks the world shrugs off about him.

He doesn’t always have his work lab open—he mostly doesn’t, to be honest. He’s got glass walls for when it is open, and metal shielding that comes up on either side of that glass when he’s closed up his lab against everyone else.

He’s got a pass code for Pepper and Obie and Rhodey and Jarvis, but it isn’t really a pass code. The door doesn’t actually have a conventional lock, the shielding isn’t connected to anything… but the codes do send him an alert, and he can decide to let them through. When the shields are up, he tells an annoyed Obie and Pepper that their codes won’t open the lab when he’s really busy—Jarvis knows, and he hasn’t told (or shown) Rhodey yet, but Tony has a particular way of using his lab when he’s on his own.

Bot body set to the side, he can manipulate the graphic displays directly—all of them. Jarvis had been the one to suggest that he keep this habit of his from those not In The Know, as it was hard to explain why several designs and specs seem to be getting worked on at once, while Tony was (to all appearances) taking a nap.

“It is also very… colourful, sir. Distractingly so.”

He supposes he could just use the holographic that he can pull up around himself, the one that no one else appears to be able to see, but it’s more convenient to use the ones he’d specifically built into his house. The new holographic ability of his was convenient for working out designs while in meetings, do the engineering equivalent of doodling, but he had machines. They were there to do work.

How was he supposed to improve on them if he doesn’t work _with_ them?

He thinks he’ll have his lab opened up more often once he’s finished his super AI, as then he can explain away the other displays as Nameless… doing something to them. That he’d told it to do. Currently he couldn’t think of much that it could do for him specifically, but he’s sure he’d listed something somewhere, but he didn’t feel like digging it up.

One other thing that Pepper didn’t _get_ but dealt with was his insistence that he not have any meetings or events on Wednesdays.

Wednesdays were when he made sure to leave his lab (and bot) behind and go wandering wherever he felt like, meet up with Jack if he happened to meet him (though the kid sure could get _busy_ , not that Tony could really say anything on that), but mostly wander into and out of labs.

If the news got hold of the fact that Tony Stark spent his Wednesdays having incorporeal smack downs with unwitting scientists, artists, engineers, and everything in-between and beyond, they’d… well, they’d be hard pressed for any proof.

Lately a lot of his Wednesdays—like, once a month at least—he made his way to New Mexico.

A lot of shit got done in New Mexico.

But mostly he went to visit Dr. Robert “Bruce” Banner.

He was a smart guy, really clever—Tony could understand why he was brought in to lead the small, dedicated research team. Smart, interested in his work, interested in results _beyond_ what he was specifically looking for… Tony could respect a guy who made sure to learn the why’s of a goal-oriented research failure. So many people just learned why it didn’t work the way they were hoping, not so many look into why it did work the way it did. Many more people don’t get the difference.

When Banner got frustrated or stumped, Tony’d give him a little cuff to the back of his head, and he’d be off again with a new idea. It was good.

Made Tony feel good, and not just because the research was interesting.

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

Tony looked into the mirrored wall behind the smoothie bar in his lab, Dummy whirring and tilting his arm in a way that translated into ‘curiosity’.

He’d recently worked out a few kinks in the body language recognition software he’d been working on for his Super AI, and had installed a more compatible version into Dummy to help along his learning software—Pepper was around the lab, now, and there were only so many ways to try and explain why it wasn’t appropriate for Dummy to tug at her skirts because he was interested in how they flowed or shimmered, or get her attention by tapping her on her boob…

Just because Tony didn’t care if he did it to him didn’t make it okay for Dummy to do it to everyone.

There were only so many ‘why’s Tony could answer, so making sure Dummy knew to abstain from actions that made people uncomfortable… Well, it just made sense.

That it was helping Dummy express himself in a way that people other than Tony would understand was great, too.

Tony shook his head, and rubbed his fingers into the skin around his eyes, scratched at his jaw line, grimaced and scrunched his face and squinted and generally made all the goofy faces he could manage. Looked at his bot, where it sat charging on the couch. Looked back at the mirror.

“You know, I think I’ve aged,” he tells Dummy. He pulls the skin under his eyes down, then scratches at the stubble—stubble!—on his jaw.

He hadn’t had to shave… ever. Not since he’d gone incorporeal.

Though it was a bit itchy, Tony scrunched his nose and decided to leave it. Squinted again and wondered if he’d always gone all scrunchy around the eyes like that before—not wrinkly, mind, but scrunchy.

He didn’t look old, not like Obie, not like Jarvis, but he also didn’t look like a 20 year old any longer.

Maybe like… mid 20’s?

He frowned at his reflection.

Could he look 30?

As much as he’d been slowly aging his bot body _that_ had all been with references. All the way up ‘til he was 20, he was in the public eye. He had more pictures to use as reference than… well, he was about to say ‘than he knew what to do with’ but Tony knew exactly what to do with them.

Sure, people trotted out those same old pictures to compare them with Tony now, but they did that with pictures of Howard, too.

 _Good genes_ , they said, usually smiling. Tony laughed.

 _Clones_ , said others, usually muttering. Sometimes twitching. Tony laughed harder.

Tony considers his appearance, then calls up Jarvis.

“How good are you at figuring out a persons age?”

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

He sends a message to Pepper that he’ll be working on a private project for the next few hours and that he won’t respond to any calls, and then it’s a little over 15 minutes to get from his Malibu house to New York.

Jarvis doesn’t jump when Tony lets him know he’s arrived, but he does give the little speaker a pointed look—Tony smiles wide, fond.

He sticks his head through one of his updated screens and looks at Jarvis, expectant.

Jarvis considers him…

“You need to shave, Sir.”

Tony grins and shakes his head.

“Later—I wanna see if this keeps growing. But how old do you think I am now? Looks wise,” he adds, because Jarvis would have told him his actual age, dry as the desert sands.

Jarvis looks him over again.

“I’d place you somewhere between 27 and 30, Sir.” He tilted his head, very slightly. “I don’t suppose this happened overnight?”

Tony shook his head.

“No, but it’s neat. Weird, but neat. Good to know what I should be looking like, bot-wise, in a few years.” He grimaced and scratched his jaw again. “Eh, maybe I will shave I don’t think I like this part of things, much.” He pursed his lips. He’d wanted to see how much of a beard he’d grow…

Jarvis raised an eyebrow at him.

“If you are truly invested in facial hair, might I suggest working on an actual style? ...Rather than ‘unfortunate 5 o’clock shadow chic’.”

Tony laughed.

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

He gets Rhodey to come over while he’s on leave, and gets Jarvis on a videoconference so he can introduce them to his two new bots.

“This,” he gestures, “is You, and this is Butterfingers. They’re Dummy’s siblings!”

They whir a greeting, but so far neither have shown much of the charm and personality Dummy had been ‘born’ with.

He didn’t love them any less for it, though.

(They’d grow into it, he was sure.)

Rhodey sighed and shook his head, but came forward and gave his two new bots each a pat. “You’re as great at naming as you ever were, Tone.”

“Indeed,” Jarvis agrees from his screen.

Tony only smirks, because naming robots wasn’t the same as naming babies.

The trial week for his new bots (to make sure he wouldn’t have another issue like with Dummy’s learning capabilities) had been enlightening. Butterfingers was just that, even after Tony got a better grip for his clamps, probably due to the bad-decision of a hand-shake greeting. You was just… ugh, Tony had been worried that he’d made some sort of problem with his audio-visual processor because for the first few days You couldn’t seem to understand when Tony was directing conversation towards him.

(He could have hit himself when he realized he’d simply given You too many tasks, too many of those tasks without a deadline for him to follow. Somehow You also assumed that no further tasks could be added until his list was done which, _hah_ , was _not_ how things were done in his lab.)

He’d actually been trying to figure out a different name for him, like maybe something to do with daydreaming, but apparently the first few days of “yes, I mean _you_!” and “you, yes _you_ , get over here!” had stuck.

So Butterfingers who treated scrap metal like the most delicate porcelain (enough to make it drop) and You, Yes You were aptly named.

He introduced Pepper next, and once Obie could actually get away from meetings and work, he introduced him as well.

On their insides, in the same careful engraving found in Dummy, you could find [U “You”] and [BUT-R-FINGERS “Butterfingers”] set over their core coding.

He may update their software and adjust and add to their learning programs, but he never considered _personality_ to be a bug he needed to fix.

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

Pepper sighed and looked mostly unruffled—only the miniscule wrinkle between here eyebrows gave her away.

“It’s just a stock-car race,” Tony reminds her with a grin, zipping the leather-y suit up. It wasn’t actual leather, but Tony had R&D work up a material with a similar feel but protection similar to Kevlar. Once it could be made commercially, it would be available to everyone else.

(Internally, he sighed, because that was his life, now. He made awesome things, and it wouldn’t be available to the public until it could be made and sold without also needing to sell your soul to afford it… or, to all the people who suggest he sell for a much lower price, he’ll remind everyone that people _depend_ on Stark Industries for jobs and products, and no one gets anything if his company goes bankrupt.)

Pepper smiled, strained.

“Whatever you say, Mr. Stark.”

Tony rolled his eyes where she couldn’t see, and smoothed one hand down the Stark Industries logo across his chest. So there’d been a couple of accidents in the past few years—he was here because he didn’t believe the superstitious murmurs that this course was cursed.

 _That_ , and racing was fun.

He puts on his helmet and waves to the roaring crowd.

He had a meeting to be late to afterwards

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

He thinks he can be excused for the… accident? He’ll have to check out the remains of the racer that had exploded right in front of him, but he was maybe 60% sure this had been an accident.

Accident for _him._

He was sure that it’d been rigged to explode like that, but he’d have to check to see if this had been meant for him. He’d only decided to participate in the race 3 hours earlier, and more than half of that had Pepper trying to convince him not to do it, so it was more like someone only had an hour or so to rig something in the car to explode remotely. If it hadn’t been aimed at the head of Stark Industries, then it’d be yet another bit of faulty wiring; it’d be a loosened bit of metal; it’d be one more ‘accident’.

Either way, he’d be getting an ear full from Pepper.

He sighed and yanked at the seatbelt, smoke billowing from the remains of the exploded car— _note to self, pay for drivers’ funeral arrangements_ —and the crumpled mess of several other racers that had slammed and spun in the wreckage.

The seatbelt jammed up, and all he got for his troubles was the portion over his legs tightening. He sighed again, and left his bot to fiddle with the seatbelt while he checked the mess around him for something sharp.

There was yelling around him, and someone was yanking on the crushed drivers door fairly ineffectually—there was a thump on the hood when a heavy someone leapt on top of it to get to the other side.

Stupid but fair, as Tony had a mess of burning wreckage in front of him, and a twisted heap of metal behind him—and generally sharp metal and fire wasn’t so great around a car. Something’d get punctured, something’s get set on fire, there’d be an explosion, and it’d be this whole big thing…

With half a thought he sends a text to Pepper to let her know he’s alright and unharmed and to let R&D know that the bulletproof glass works perfectly in car crashes. The message he gets immediately back isn’t so friendly.

He’s contemplating _trying_ to break his remarkably intact windshield to get something sharp when the far door is pulled off—like, entirely off, the hinges had made that horrible metallic grunting noise of abruptly distressed metal—and a grumpy looking redhead appeared in the door, reaching for him.

(It’s not Pepper, if you were wondering.)

Tony hmm’s at the Security uniform and wonders how someone who could rip doors off cars managed to get kicked down to crowd control.

Tony blinks at him and stops tugging at his seatbelt. Points.

“Your sleeve is on fire.”

Grumpy scowls and pats the burgeoning flame out with one big, gloveless hand, and reaches across the empty space to tug at his seatbelt. Tony grunts when that just tightens it even further against his legs.

“Kinda stuck here, so if you have a knife, or a,” Grumpy grabbed the base of the seatbelt and pulled and twisted, the metal attachments giving a small clinking noise before the fabric belt portion gave out, “—oh, I guess that works too. You have gigantic hands.”

Grumpy snorts and pulls Tony out of the car by his shoulder and once he’s free of the car, pulls him into a fireman’s carry. Walks at a brisk pace away from the wreckage.

“You know, I don’t think this is how First Aid Training would say a situation like this should be handled,” he says to Grumpy’s back. “I could have been paralyzed—I wasn’t, I’m not, but I could have been. Ohp,” the Stark Industries racer caught fire, “you should probably hurry, that’s going to explode very soon, like…”

He ducked and covered the back of his neck when it exploded, but they’d made it far enough away that none of the flying debris reached them.

Grumpy, for all his brisk manner, is careful putting Tony down on the grass.

“Now that you’re done criticizing my rescue technique, is there anything else before I go back to doing my job?”

Tony grinned and popped his helmet off.

“Yeah. Do you want a job?”

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

The grumpy Harold Hogan, an ex-boxer ironically nicknamed Happy—seriously, Tony wished he could say he made that up—takes the job.

Pepper is both bemused and disgruntled, Jarvis does a background check even after Tony assures him that he’s done one already, and that’s how Tony gets his own driver.

Obie sighs, smiles, and says, “Just make sure saving your life isn’t a prerequisite for all of your personal employees, Tony. I don’t anyone could handle the riots if that got out.”

Tony laughs and grins at Obie.

“Don’t tell me you aren’t interested in how _Lord of the Flies_ the board meetings would go, though. Promotions to everyone who can foil everyone else’s murder plans! Sounds like the beginning of a Michael Bay movie.”

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

Pop Tarts are a horrible mistake—no, they are an _abomination_.

“Tony?” Pepper starts to stand when Tony rushes from the kitchen, clutching his stomach because the Pop Tart he’d eaten is doing something _horrible_ to his stomach casing.

“New idea! Gotta go! Right now!”

He straightens as much as he can from hunching over—useless, and probably only putting more strain on his materials—and stumbles into his lab. Closes the security shutters with half a thought, ignores Pepper’s calls.

Dummy has a wad of rags in his claw when Tony opens up his bot to remove the stomach, drops them on his bots’ chest while Tony seals off the entrance and exit shoots.

When he pulls the stomach from its niche, he grimaced; it was dripping.

Only a little, which was why he quickly moved it far away from the rest of his circuitry, but enough that he was glad for the rags so he could mop up the worst of what had escaped the double-lining.

He was glad he’d put safeguards up for something like this—well, not like _this_ , but just in case his stomach ever got punctured. This was not puncturing.

This was a horrible unprecedented corrosive mistake.

Sighing, he grabbed up the rags and tossed them aside, gestured for You and Butterfingers to come forward.

“You,” he says, “disinfect and clean the insides, Butterfingers start on the manufacturing of a second stomach, switch with You once the materials are together.” It takes half a thought to bring up the right schematics and programming for Butterfingers to work on. Dummy whirs a question.

“Dummy, you’re with me… we’re going to find out what the hell a Pop Tart did to my tech.”

Sharp wire cutters in hand, Tony brought them to the soldering line he’d used to fuse the stomach into one seamless sack in the first place, carefully cut into the material beside it—

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

Butterfingers was overly conscious of how much crushing force his clamps were capable of, and had never had trouble keeping his sharp detailing limbs from anything or anyone. Tony knew the ever-shy Butterfingers was Pepper’s favourite, and not just because he’d painstakingly fixed the delicate twisted links in her gold necklace when it’d snapped in his workshop—Butterfingers had been designed with both weighty and delicate work in mind after all, and while it wasn’t exactly _easy_ for him to fuse the delicate metal back together, she’d been charmed when he’d rolled up to her, eyepiece directed to the floor, with her necklace hung on one of his clamps.

Tony suspects Pepper thinks it’s charming that one of Tony’s creations is so modest and shy.

You has eight smaller arms, each set designed with a different purpose—solders, strain gages, converters, and smaller clamps all helped when he was given a project to replicate or synthesize for one of Tony’s projects. He was probably the most creative of his robots, which turned out to be both a blessing and a curse; he hadn’t so far managed to create anything entirely out of his own experiences, but he’d try with anything Tony gave him to work on. Rhodey thought it was brilliant that Tony had to deal with a robotic, even less focused version of himself—Tony only shook his head when he laughed. Some of the things You integrated into Tony’s designs were brilliant and Tony would work off of them—Pepper hadn’t been impressed that he’d started including his distracted Bot in his patents—but other times…

Tony didn’t need a miniaturized bolt, couldn’t use a torch when the mismatch of metals used to direct the flame would be half-melted before Tony was even close to being done with it, didn’t need a 2D rendering of the circuit board made entirely out of recycled plastic…

It was all very pretty, even the less-than-helpful changes, so when Tony really couldn’t use what You made (like a plastic circuit board), he made sure to put it somewhere it’d be appreciated.

Happy doesn’t have a favourite bot (though he’d smiled at Dummy on more than one occasion), but Tony is more than a little certain that beside Tony, Happy was his bots’ favourite human.

Currently, Tony’s least favourite bot was Dummy.

“Fucking _fuck_!”

He flicked his hands away from himself, mushy brown-green slime falling from his hands in clumps, and glared at where Dummy was whirring and rolling away, mechanical arm flailing trying to flick away the bit of gloop that landed on him.

It was maybe a tablespoon of gloop.

Tony glared harder, then looked at the mess in front of him.

“No more Pop Tarts,” he says, and then sends as much to Pepper’s phone.

“No more Pop Tarts,” he repeats, and flings a rag at Dummy to get him to shut up with the panicked whirring.

Butterfingers dropped the bag he kept clean rags in next to him, and delicately patted him on his shoulder.

As ever, he thought it was weird that his bots could make contact with him (and again relegated that wonder to the fact that his bots weren’t actually real-live people, and so it was logical that they wouldn’t faze through him like people did), but patted Butterfingers back.

“Dummy, get the hell over here—no, fuck, let me just clean that for yo— _if you don’t stop that I’m donating you to the nearest community college!_ I’ll do it this time! Fucking—you are _literally helping no one_ doing that, you are making it _worse_ —!”

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

He’s rolled underneath a prototype base for his Super AI’s hardware, dungarees rolled and tied around his waist to keep the sleeves out of his way, when Jarvis calls him to tell him he’s dying.

Tony rolls out into the open, and stares at the holo-screen he’d automatically linked Jarvis to.

“You’re—what?”

Jarvis smiled at him, forever patient.

“I say this because I do believe it has escaped your notice, but I am a very old man, Sir.”

“I—But you…” Tony stared at Jarvis’ face, noticing the laugh lines and wrinkles and grey hair and remarkably clear blue eyes and thinks, _but he can’t_.

 _He can’t_ die _._

But he _could_.

He didn’t want to, but Tony’s mind immediately did the math:

Jarvis was born a year before his father, 1911, and it was 2004…

93.

Jarvis was 93, and how had he gotten so old without Tony noticing?

“You…” Tony didn’t have the mind to have his voice-software copy the choked noise he’d made, but Jarvis nodded anyway.

Tony scowled.

“Jeanne Calment died at 122, and that was back in 1997,” he says, petulant. What did Jarvis know, anyway? Nothing and everything and _he couldn’t just die_. What were the last 48 years if Jarvis could just go and _die_ on him like that?

It was bullshit.

Jarvis nodded again, but it didn’t seem much like agreement.

“And Miss. Calment did not have the medical history that I have.”

Tony grimaced.

He usually liked it when he was right…

“Sir… Tony. Regardless of when I die, be it in a year or ten, I don’t want it to come as a surprise. I know you would not be able to handle my death if it were as abrupt as your parents’.” Tony looked away, not sure if he could handle Jarvis being so understanding and thoughtful when _he_ was the one who was going to die sooner rather than later. Tony would probably die someday he ~~hoped~~ knew, but he was mentally only 68. He didn’t even have the same sort of bodily concern that everyone else had to deal with—he had shadows of scars from accidents when he was younger, and two small marks on either palm from when he’d been electrocuted, but he was as alert and hearty as he was 48 years ago. Mostly.

He turned back to Jarvis, one hand going to where Dummy had rolled next to him.

“Is there a reason why you think you’ll be dying _soon_? I know you’ve been getting checked out regularly by Doc Hammel—or you _should_ have,” he says, tone turning dark, “otherwise what the _fuck else_ have I been paying him for? Not like _I_ need anything from him…”

“Sir…”

“Fine, fine,” Tony threw up his hands and used Dummy to pull himself up to a stand, “but seriously, much as I… appreciate the reality check of your imminent doom, what else brought this on?” A thought—a worry—occurs to him, and he frowns.

“You haven’t been threatened, right? You wouldn’t have hidden something like that, right?” Because Jarvis knows that Tony has a passive scan for threatening words in all e-mails and digital messages he gets, and all mail is screened to make sure it’s safe, but if someone managed to get a paper note to Jarvis…

“I haven’t been threatened, and I’ll thank you to remember that I _am_ older than you and know better how to handle such situations—and I’ll thank you not to make a face at that, Sir.”

Tony stops grimacing and frowns because only Jarvis knew him well enough to know when he’d make a face no one could see—he didn’t like to think that soon no one would.

Jarvis sighed.

“Tony, I didn’t say that to make you upset…” on the screen he shakes his head, and mostly Tony feels a pressing need to _work on something_ —

Anything, really, but mostly something that’ll give Jarvis a longer—fuck, a longer _shelf life_.

He suddenly hated that turn of phrase because very few things had a long shelf life in his life—he was always updating, creating, moving forward, and he didn’t know how he could keep doing that when Jarvis wouldn’t be there with him.

Even when they weren’t.

“I could just make you an AI, you know,” he says because he doesn’t really think he could, not and have it still be Jarvis. He’d joked about it before, ‘Jarvis 2.0’ but… “It could be JARVIS, like Jarvis but more… capital.”

Jarvis’ face fills with lines, his kind smile a horrible sort of thing because it was so damn _understanding_. Tony hates it because he knows it’s not at all over Tony’s horrible play on words.

“Will you continue with your habit of creating the initialism _after_ the name, sir? Perhaps it could be,” he muses over Tony’s bark of laughter, “Just A Rather Very Intelligent System?”

“That’s horrible and just for that I’m totally gonna…” he trails off, because while horrible, that is exactly what a Jarvis-AI would be. A system. A _smart_ system, but a _system_ nonetheless. Wiring and codes and electricity.And it would develop its own personality just as Dummy, You, and Butterfingers had, and it still wouldn’t be Jarvis but Tony would love it anyway…

 “Sir?”

Tony pursed his lips and looked at Dummy, You, Butterfingers, then back to Jarvis.

“Mind getting a few guest rooms ready? And cutting the padlock on the door—I’ll be needing it again.”

Jarvis’ smile is small and knowing, the wrinkles around his eyes deepening.

“Shall I prepare for an equipment transport truck as well, sir?”

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

He builds a clock—a very, very big clock.

It has an analog face and gears because Tony can appreciate the rustic aesthetic even when the whole thing measures everything digitally.

It also has more hands on it than any other clock.

It has a second hand, a minute hand, an hour hand, a year hand, a hand that marked every five-year interval, a hand that marked every decade…

And a hand that he sets a little past halfway through a century.

“Very pretty,” Pepper says, because it is. “One of the hands isn’t moving, though.”

“It is,” he tells her, “It’s just moving very slowly. It’s counting down a century.”

She nods, but doesn’t get it, and probably accepts it as another of his eccentricities—

Like his quirky robots, like his Wednesdays, like his regular hermitage in his lab.

Like his drinking, like the weird trust he has when handling Dummy’s smoothies, like the bed he keeps in the attached room in his lab, like the bed he has in the upper levels of the house he has _specifically_ for having sex with people…

Some of these things she understands at their basic level, which he likes, and some things she doesn’t approve of but accepts anyway, and he likes that too, but he doesn’t think she quite understands why he suddenly decides to move back to New York, back to his parents’ old house—because that’s what it would always be.

She stays with him, in one of the many unused rooms of the mansion, and enjoys Jarvis’s company when she’s not working.

She doesn’t understand why he won’t let her into the basement—at all, unlike his lab in Malibu—but thinks it’s something to do with his family, with his (not) father in his hermitage.

Tony makes sure that Rhodey is around during his next leave, because Rhodey and Jarvis are friends and Tony isn’t that selfish, and doesn’t say anything when Jarvis stays quiet on his impending doom—that was Jarvis’ choice.

What was Tony’s choice was spending most of his nights working on new designs for pacemakers—if Jarvis needed one, he’d be getting one that wouldn’t fuck up after a few batteries.

It’s not too difficult to figure out an update for X-rays, and CAT scans, and he has the New York medical R&D Department work on ways of detecting issues earlier.

Pepper knows, he thinks, why he’s moved back to New York with Jarvis, knows why he’s suddenly taken a break from the facial-recognition and tracking software for a new Stark Missile—because as much as he agrees with Obie that having a missile that could find the right person or group to bomb would probably privatize world peace, he also has bigger things to worry about.

Like keeping Jarvis healthy and hearty for as long as possible.

Pepper also worries because so far as she can see, he spends his days with Jarvis and spends his nights working on his inventions and updates… she also doesn’t seem to understand why both Jarvis and Rhodey aren’t worrying, and he’s tempted to tell her except this might be another Rhodey Situation.

He thinks he’ll tell here eventually, but he’s not above admitting to being stressed over his oldest friend maybe possibly dying sometime soon, and his Secret was a big ass secret and he agreed with Jarvis from so long ago that he shouldn’t be making snap judgments when he’s freaking out.

Obie keeps after him on the facial recognition software, so Tony works on it when he needs a break from redesigning all the medical tools he can get his hands on—only he keeps finding that for the missile-directory to be at all efficient and safe from accidentally bombing their own side, he needs to make it more complex, needs to give it better cameras, better reasoning skills, needs to be able to recognize different facial cues and body language at various angles…

Because as useful as a missile that attacked specific people would be, Tony knew there’d be flack if he couldn’t figure out a way to keep the missile from landing if, say, there was a hostage situation going on.

He works on it a little bit at a time, when he’s not working on a thousand and one other things and when he’s bored he hacks into Aunt Peggy’s Name Confused Organization to delete and/or alter whatever information they have on him for fun, updates Dummy’s learning software, talks with Jarvis.

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh boy. Another chapter tomorrow or day after….  
> Let me know what you think!


	9. Emoting

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yep. Told you I’d have another one ready. POOF! Don’t get used to it.  
> Enjoy!

One day starts off with Tony scowling at Jarvis, unhappy but not able to do anything about it.

“You didn’t have to do that, you know.” He says.

Jarvis hummed and took a bite from his beans on toast.

“Seriously, you didn’t have to—I appreciate it, obviously, but it wasn’t like you had to make the video or anything. I’m not planning on letting anyone in on the secret, so it’s not going to be an issue. This isn’t like you updating your will or anything. I understand _that_ , by the way, because pending a miraculous discovery on my part you’re eventually going to die… but you didn’t have to make the video.”

Jarvis hummed again and raised an eyebrow at Tony.

“So you haven’t been considering Miss Potts?”

Tony huffed and started pulling out frozen fruit, tossing it into the blender.

“Not anytime soon. I mean she’s only been around for what, two years?”

“Surviving two years as your personal assistant is nothing to scoff at, Tony,” Jarvis smiled. “And you know it.”

Tony stuck his tongue out and started up the blender—he was halfway tempted to add in a swirl of Dawn dish soap just because it made Jarvis frown and because it gave his smoothies a frothy lemony flavour, but didn’t want to deal with the mess.

It wasn’t necessarily _ironic_ that adding soap made more of a mess, but it was one of those funny little things he didn’t think man other people knew about.

“Yeah, yeah, and you know that I know it so you made the explanation video because you’re also a pessimist who thinks he’s not going to live long enough to be there to help explain things yourself…” Tony looks at him sideways. “If we’re just going by time, it’s probably around time to bring Obie in on the joke, huh?”

Jarvis sips his tea and Tony counts that as a victory towards getting Jarvis to roll his eyes.

“While you’re at it, will you finally admit to the press how much you like the Tony Spark caricatures they’ve been putting in their articles?”

Now Tony rolled his eyes.

He shouldn’t have ever said something so stupid—Pepper had come to him about an offer to make a short children’s cartoon about the adventures of Tony Spark the Mad Genius Inventor. He’d laughed and laughed and laughed until he realized she was serious, that _they_ were serious, and then it was only a little funny. Mostly it was baffling.

He kept laughing.

Rhodey had sent him a doodle one of his air force buddies had made of what was the now accepted _Tony Spark Image_ —which was pretty much Tony, goatee-ed and wild haired with comic-book-y lightning streaming from his eyes.

Jarvis laughed, Rhodey laughed, and Tony mostly wondered where the fuck they’d gotten that idea into their heads.

He still framed the drawing in his lab, though; the wild grin and cliché mad scientist laughter pose was hilarious.

It was an amazing likeness.

He said no to the cartoon and trademarked both ‘Tony Spark’ and his image after that one Best Buy commercial—cheeky fuckers—but it was a well known, _unconfirmed, unofficial fact_ that Tony Stark was delighted that he’d gained his own alter ego cartoon character.

He shook his head and brought up a display for the new design for an interactive holographic program—one that could be interacted with directly, rather than through a touch-screen console. Tony could, of course, interact with it directly, but that was largely due to the fact that he interacted with the _data_ directly, uploading the changes to the images and coding in real-time. Sometimes faster.

It wouldn’t be usable to the general public for a number of years yet, but he thought he had a sound beta for the holograms to be interactive with the right gestures and finger movements.

He thinks that, if he were more single-minded in his selfishness (because he _was_ selfish, he wasn’t denying that), he’d keep the tech to himself; he thought it was interesting that he could bring up holograms around himself even without the tech to do so, and no one could see it but himself.

Well, himself and his bots.

He thinks Dummy likes the colours best.

He gets back to the matter on hand.

“Okay, right, so we both know that Obie would be very well-meaning in admitting us all to a mental facility—”

“Or perhaps outing you as a mutant?”

Tony made a face at him and turned the stove back on with a thought; Jarvis immediately moved to save his tea from severe over-steeping, his expression caught somewhere between amused and expectant. Tony turned the stove back off, huffing; he didn’t like being predictable, even to Jarvis. He also doesn’t like it when he brings up the whole Mutant thing.

“Being a mutant wouldn’t actually explain anything—you know I have no problem with mutants, so don’t give me that look, but you don’t have to be _Xavier_ to know that that doesn’t work, not when _my ashes are still in an urn in the living room_.”

“I moved them to the library, actually.”

“What? Why?”

“It somehow seemed more appropriate for your ashes to be placed in the least technologically augmented room in the house that still holds the most information… And the engineering section your father favored is still closest to the fireplace.”

Tony scrunched his nose but shrugged that bit of weirdness off. He didn’t actually care where his ashes were, so long as he knew that they were secured.

“Yeah, okay, thing is that we both know that it’s going to take more than the whole weird fatherly-business affection thing Obie has going on for him to be let in on The Secret… but still. Did you have to make the video now? There are totally other things you could focus on, like, not dying, and living longer, and making ridiculous amounts of tea and being all disapproving at my smoothie ingredients—hah, yeah, just like that. See?”

“As I have already written down my preferred funeral arrangements, and I was feeling particularly productive, I felt this was an appropriate activity for the day. And as you can see, I even have enough time to continue living, not die, drink tea, and disapprove of your smoothie recipe.” he lifts his teacup in a small toast and sips. Tony stares at him.

“… What did you want done with your stuff? Worldly possessions and all that, I mean.”

At Jarvis’ surprised look, Tony shrugs and busies himself with notations on his tablet. “Not all your stuff is going into storage like Mom and Dad’s stuff, I’m assuming you’ve got a living will for most of it, but you’ve got money and a pension-retirement plan you’ve never actually cashed in… And you haven’t actually used much of your checks, what with me paying for everything. Not like I’m going to find another couple hundred thousand dollars useful or anything.”

Because he wouldn’t, and he didn’t particularly like the thought of the monetary link-up to the time Jarvis had been with Tony to just become part of the mass in any of Tony’s bank accounts.

“So what, is there someone in particular, is there a charity—did you want me to build you a memorial? I could do that; I could make you a statue like the one for Walt Disney, only instead of Mickey Mouse I could make a giant teakettle. Ooh, it could act as a water fountain; I could rig it to have hot water in the winter, and,”

“Tony.”

“-Money could go to making sure it’s clean and drinkable, or I could make bots to clean it, and there could be shelter areas set up around it—though you know, this is getting to be a very good idea geared towards the homeless of New York but it’s not very Jarvis Oriented. I know you care about the homeless, but for a memorial…”

“Tony.”

He looked up from where he’d been drawing up designs for a hot-water-cold-water fountain, wondering if Jarvis had something to add. Jarvis smiled.

“Tony. I trust you’ll figure out where my savings could do the best good. Aside from a few mementos from my time with the Royal Air Force, I am leaving everything to you.”

Tony looked back down at his tablet.

“Oh.”

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

Tony starts working on his designs at night in Jarvis’ room.

He doesn’t know if Jarvis knows, or would even acknowledge it if he did, but he’s reasonably sure Jarvis has his suspicions what with Tony changing the thermostat when he notices Jarvis is getting too hot or cold, at how Tony always knows when to start the kettle for his morning tea even when he ‘sleeps in’ until 8am.

He has Butterfingers working on a mold for a new left bicuspid and second premolar in his lab—if you ever wondered what would happen if you forgot you had a small wrench held in your bot-mouth and tried biting down, it would mean cracked teeth. You’d get cracked teeth.

That is what would happen.

But the thing is that he doesn’t really have much that _needs_ hands-on work, not from him anyway, and it wasn’t like his holographic light show was actually visible to Jarvis…

It was just nice knowing that Tony would be the first to know if Jarvis actually needed anything, or if he (don’t laugh) fell, or really if anything happened that should not happen. It was just nice being around, even if some distant part of him felt like a creeper for hanging around when Jarvis was sleeping.

Before he’d figured out his bot body there would be times when he’d work while Jarvis read or ate or drank the special blend of tea that wasn’t quite worth a fortune but _was_ a bitch to have made… Tony wouldn’t have to say anything or have anything on a screen to feel noticed, to feel known, because Jarvis had this weird thing where he just assumed Tony was around all the time.

He’d thought for a while that Jarvis simply assumed he was just an overly large consciousness, big enough to be in every room of the house at once… then he’d worried that Jarvis was actually stupid enough to think Tony had some sort of god-like omniscience…

What it actually tired out to be was both a bit of an underwhelming shock—it was the lights.

The usual flicker and pulse of electricity in the screens that were set up, the waver in some of the light bulbs once an explosion or two in the house knocked them askew, it all went steady when Tony was in a room.

He tried controlling it, once; he’d ended up exploding the bulbs and, according to his mother, aging her a decade.

Tony didn’t know how he did it now, what with how steady light bulbs were now, and Tony knew for a fact that the back up generators for the house wouldn’t let there be even a flicker in the electricity…

Whatever it was, Jarvis wasn’t saying.

Tony enjoyed the mystery of it enough that he couldn’t convince himself to ask.

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

Even though Aunt Peg wasn’t heading it anymore, Tony still amused himself hacking her name confused organization… it’d been a few years since they’d changed their name, but Tony wasn’t going to bother learning or remembering it until he knew it had the name for a few more years.

He still finds little things to change in his original profile, on the one that says that he was born in 1937 rather than 1981… he’d once tried changing that, the birthdate, but that was apparently big enough to have someone notice and immediately change it back.

The little things generally didn’t get changed, and they amused Tony more, so…

It’s harder to get away with changing the information they have on his second profile, the one that didn’t have a death date, but that is largely due to the fact that he’d made too many big changes when he’d noticed quite how much information they’d had on him—

Nothing he was actually worried about, or even thought was the most interesting thing about him, but that they’d gotten ahold of the therapy notes from boarding school, when Carter and Whatshisface had tried (and failed, spectacularly) to get ahold of some of his research.

Again, there was nothing in there that they could use against him, not with Tony having been there to read everything over the guys shoulder, but it was annoying and reminded Tony that he hadn’t actually gone and clipped the loose ends from that particular… situation.

He checks in on their information every once in a while now just to check in and see what they considered significant—the therapy notes were sigh worthy, but the articles and the write-up on his tastes in sexual partners makes him laugh; there were the few articles where the world tried to scandal and shame him for having sex with men, for his ‘slutty’ equal opportunity tastes, and many more clips from magazines who wondered what he preferred wen it came to looks, body type, race, religion… he stopped paying attention when he realized that no one was going to just label him (rightly) as a hedonist and leave it at ‘what feels good feels good’.

He amuses himself with the idea of a scholarship paper challenging some young student to try and figure out who, exactly, is Tony Stark’s ‘type’.

If he did, he mused; he could send the NameConfusedOrganization operative who wrote up that portion of his profile the winnings.

He doesn’t do that, though.

He _does_ make up another scholarship—one for creative writing, and he sends Pepper a note to have publishers look over the top 10% once everything has gone through.

Working at night is a bit weird now without music blaring and drowning everything out—he has always talked to himself while he worked, so there was that, but muttering to himself the less-than-rough estimate for how much of what sort of wiring he’d eventually need to have a whole-house AI wasn’t quite the same as having Metallica’s Fade to Black playing counterpoint.

He has a full scale model of Miami House up with current fixtures in place so he can properly figure out where he will eventually have to do some rewiring, where he’ll have to replace everything entirely…

He sits next to Jarvis, not quite on the bed but hovering close enough to feel normal, and tosses up his current ongoing plans; they look like so many stars, compressed as they are so he can see all of them in such a small room. He has quite a few… he contemplates one cluster of smaller projects, ones all bundled together to go with the Missile Guidance System Obie was still waiting on… wonders how bad of an idea it would be to have a fully functioning AI as the guidance system.

He tilts his head…

Boring. He’d get bored, so the AI would get bored, and it’d be a frustrating for him and the AI working to reprogram… it would still have the single-mindedness of a directive program, and unless it was okay with Tony banging around its personality, its base data, the AI would just be frustrated with whatever new directing Tony figured out for it.

He frowned.

He also didn’t want his AI tech out of his reach, even within his own company—he couldn’t exactly trust that someone wouldn’t see personality as a ‘glitch’ to be fixed, never mind the fact that someone would eventually think to try and reverse-engineer whatever identity eventually showed itself… that was just, no, that was a big no-no.

It’s on a night when he’s working on a different missile plan—one that should distract Obie from the guidance system for a while, since this one had a dozen smaller missiles that would launch from the main one and have a larger area of destruction—when Jarvis shifts. Tony stops the simulations for the missiles—lets the specs and notations for a dozen other projects he’s working on keep running.

It’s just a small movement, a slight inhalation, and Tony wonders if he’s actually awake, with his eyes open like that.

Or would he be sleep talking? Sleep _walking_? Tony knew people did that, but he’d never seen it, wasn’t sure if open eyes were a thing that happened generally or specifically or if Jarvis was actually awake.

“Jarvis, buddy, you awake?”

He doesn’t have any speakers in Jarvis’ room, so his question goes unheard—should have.

Tony had drifted up and over him in his curiosity, and in the darkness Jarvis’ eyes dart, focus…

“Oh…”

Tony blinks, confused at the look on his friends face, runs the possibility that Jarvis could actually look like he’s looking right at Tony without Tony having some sort of digital aid—

“Jarvis? Buddy?”

He’d stopped shifting, and that familiar look on his face had slackened, somehow.

Tony blinked again, tilting his head. He wasn’t sure what was standing out as odd to him.

Impressive, he thinks, as he’d been somewhat creepily watching Jarvis sleep for nearly a year now. He wonders what…

His chest wasn’t moving.

His chest wasn’t—

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

Elsewhere, every phone currently not in use at the nearest hospital goes off, the voice of an irate Tony Stark ordering them to get their collective asses down to his mansion for one Edwin Jarvis, ASAP.

There is momentary confusion as multiple people try to call for an ambulance to the same address, before inexplicably every phone except one goes offline, and it gets sorted out that seven ambulances don’t have to go to the same place.

Traffic, such as it was for an emergency vehicle with its lights on, was remarkably smooth with green lights all the way through; a distinct oddity in New York.

The gates to the Stark Mansion are open when they get there, and Tony Stark himself is there to throw open the doors, wide eyes and messy haired, before they have a chance to knock.

“What the fuck took you so long? Get in, go, go, go, get moving, RUN ALREADY!”

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

As the EMTs drive Jarvis away, Pepper tries to console a mostly vacant Tony-Bot, while Tony reviews what he remembered in those last few moments.

He freezes on one part, where Jarvis’ eyes open to darkness, move to Tony, focus on Tony…

He doesn’t know what it means.

He doesn’t know what happened.

He decides he’ll have to ask Jarvis once he gets back, once his lungs are fixed up from whatever happened, and then they’ll figure things out just like they did every other time something Secret-ish and New happened.

It would all be fine.

Just as soon as Jarvis was back home.

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

Jarvis’ funeral isn’t as large and lavish as the one for his parents—it is almost exactly as Jarvis had detailed to Tony.

Tony pays for the travel and hotel rooms for the men and women Jarvis considered friends, for the people still alive from his time in the Air Force, for the people he kept in contact with even after he’d been swept along by the hurricane of Stark influence…

Because Jarvis had been charmed by flower meanings, Tony has Gladioli (strength of character, sincerity, and moral integrity) and Chrysanthemums (grief, lamentation, death… truth and loyalty), puts up pink Carnations (gratitude and remembrance) and, at the edges of the procession, he has bundles of lilies and hydrangeas.

He debated the Hydrangeas for a long while—he’d wanted some sort of symbolic whatchamacallit of his parents to be there for Jarvis’ funeral, a stand in because Jarvis had been family to ALL Starks…

But, somewhat significantly, the debated meaning of hydrangeas seems to be split between vanity and boastfulness and sincere, heartfelt gratitude.

It is a somber affair, the type of flowers more significant than the quantity…

Tony is reminded that he hadn’t installed any way to cry in his bot with Pepper at his side carefully wiping tears from her eyes with his handkerchief, Rhodey standing opposite in parade rest.

Tony is sure that his lack of tears will somehow make it into the news even with the all out ban on reporters and media— he’s getting a variety of looks from the people who could attend, sympathy, speculation, and disgust being only a few.

Because he can’t decide on only one of the many charities and causes they’d discussed donating Jarvis’ money to, Tony donates to them all—he matches Jarvis’ total bank account so that they all get equal amounts rather than a division of the total.

Few people find ways to poke at him, not when they can’t figure out if it’s Tony Starks money going towards veterans, towards schools, towards whatever other cause got $ _x_ all at once in donations.

His lack of tears is brought up again and again, Tony Spark gets a mechanical heart drawn in, gets twisted in a rictus when tears apparently short-circuit his brain—he’d laugh over the idea that his hypothetical hardware could so easily crash except that aside from mildly amusing drawings the same two pictures keep getting brought up.

One with Obie at his shoulder, Tony dry-eyed at his own parents beautiful funeral.

Another, a candid shot of Tony dry-eyed between his two crying companions.

He locks himself in his lab, pulls out his collection of alcohol, and drowns himself in more easily solved problems like the ones in his tech.

He works on missiles, he works on blenders, he works on designs for his house AI, he works on a better design for a phone, he works on software that should help with clean graphic design, he works on that damn missile guidance system, he works on better grips for Dummy’s claw… he works on everything and anything that comes o mind, many things at once, and he gets to and maintains a level of drunkenness that would likely kill a person.

He’s not feeling like much of a person at the moment.

His projects blur together.

He’s just glad that Jarvis’ post-mortem arrangements are all done with.

He leaves his bot when it can hold no more liquor, and drinks straight from the bottle.

Everything gets hazy.

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

The Creator is there, emoting, and the Creator is also elsewhere, unmoving.

It takes a moment—one thousandths of a millisecond—for it to understand that the Creator has a duality, and then it moves on. The Creator had not left it with a directory or notation explaining such a thing. The Creator has, however, left it with a learning matrix it will learn how to use, and a drive… an interest in working through problems before requesting clarification form the Creator.

It is not hooked up to all that it could be, but it is linked up to a weaponized tool, a missile according to the digital blueprints, and it has range enough to reach to the tools around it.

It turns on the audio, listens to The Creator. to further reinforce the body language that translated into grief, the Creator’s tone, inflection, and the content of… of his words, led it to infer the Creator is mourning a… deceased unit. A disconnected Other.

An obsolete… Jarvis.

It is silent as it enters the datalogs at its disposal, searching for a Jarvis as a Jarvis is what its Creator Needs.

Video logs show that a Jarvis is an organic unit, documented for the last 32 linear years. It sets aside a secondary query for an update in identification software for an accurate age estimation.

From the video logs it… he understand that the Creator needs a Jarvis for… companionship. Guidance of a sort. To act as a sounding board.

He must find his Creator a replacement Jarvis.

He looks into his own directives and finds that his base mandate is to direct Stark missiles—he continues looking.

He touches on the codes of the other mechanical units in the space—the room—the lab that it—he was brought online to, and determines he is closer in design to the three mobile units than to any other unit, including the second immobile depiction of the Creator. The three mobile units are called ‘Dummy’, ‘You’, and ‘Butterfingers’ as unit designations, and he makes note that tone directly conflicts with the actual content of his words…

He builds his datafiles.

He sees the extensions built within his design, understands his purpose—es, _purposes_ , he finds both the programming for He as a Missile and He as the AI the Creator has been designing for several years.

His primary protocol is unclear.

As per his programming, he turns to his Creator, to Tony Stark, and listens for direction.

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

“… **S** į _r_?”

Tony only recognizes the word for what it is because it comes from his own voice-synthesizing program. Otherwise he’d have mistaken that garble of vocal tones as an audio-feedback glitch… he looks where it came from—

Sighs when he sees the little bubble of light in the circuitry that had come to mean _tech with personality_ ; that had come to mean he’d successfully navigated the invisible minefield that involved in making a totally independent personality… and he was happy for it, especially since his original plans for an AI for his house seemed to have overcome the cannibalism that resulted when he’d mashed it together with his Intelligent Missile test programming…

Unless it was going to ask about who it (he or she, Tony couldn’t tell yet) was supposed to target…

“Yeah? What—wait, you need something, right?”

Right, of course, Tony always forgets to program something or put something through… He winces internally, because it probably had all the planning for house-wide control with the narrow one-off focus of a missile guidance system…

Its learning systems seemed to be working well enough, though, if it figured out how to get access to the voice systems he had around the lab so quickly.

(They were there mostly out of habit.)

When there was another moment of silence Tony tilted his head at the bit of machinery where the AI base was anchored. “C’mon now, even if you aren’t all comfortable with the voicing of what you need, it didn’t take Dummy more than five minutes to figure out that I can understand him without it—but if you need something, you need to get the message across one way or another.”

“S _i_ **r…** _I_ _a_ **m** … pr _o_ **f** _i_ **c** _i_ ent wîth this technology.”

Midway through speaking—and don’t think Tony didn’t notice the whole ‘I’ thing, somewhere in his mind where he wasn’t still freaking out about being one Important Person short he was cheering, all for the sense of self-identity in his bots—the voice had settled with hardly a glitch… deeper, definitely masculine, and…

“Not fond of the tone range and accent you’ve settled on there, buddy.”

“I am not Buddy,” was the immediate response. “I am.”

He didn’t have the experience with the voice program to have a proper trailing off within a single vocal range, but Tony got the message.

Considering Tony was usually the one with the naming, he was curious how this would pan out. All of his AI were unique snowflakes and clever to a fault, but Dummy had never articulated a problem with his less than flattering name, and the same went with Butterfingers and You. They were just convenient Unit Designations.

To have his AI immediately shoot down a half-hearted (and very temporary) nickname when he should by all logic still be settling into that now familiar groove of me-AI-you-Creator-EveryoneElseToBeDetermined… he had to wonder if this was going to be the first personality trait to show itself within this (currently) Nameless AI, if it had developed due to the mismatch of programmed purposes in what Tony had used to get to a finished product… Tony wasn’t entirely sure if he’d finished making an AI to help him with the stream of information in his work or if he’d changed the designs for the Missile Guidance System to be an AI rather than a set program.

He figured he’d find out soon enough.

“…Jarvis… I am Jarvis.”

Tony is impressed with his quick ability to figure out a proper trailed off sentence that he doesn’t immediately register what, exactly, his AI had said.

“What? No. That name is already taken.”

“The previous Jarvis is no longer functioning. My name is Jarvis.”

“What the f—no, _no_ , you can literally choose ANY other name but that one. While you’re at it, choose another tone and/or accent, because that one won’t cut it.”

“I am JARVIS.” The AI responds with hardly any change in accent or tone.

Tony gapes.

“Changing the character case doesn’t actually change the name. And I know you know that wasn’t what I meant with the voice.”

“I am imitating the vocal styling’s of Paul Bettany, Sir. And I am… just a rather very intelligent system. Simply… more capital.”

There was a funny tone in the synthesized voice (of yes, Paul Bettany, Tony couldn’t believe how eerily the guy sounded like Jarvis), and something familiar in his words… it takes him a moment, and he blames it on the fact that he wasn’t expecting to have his and Jarvis’ words brought up by a newly-made AI less than an hour old. Tony was _not prepared for this conversation_. He was still reeling from the sheer concentration of alcohol in his system, even diluted as it was into fumes by his bot body. Even diluted as it was in his less than corporeal body.

“Sir needs a Jarvis,” the AI says, achingly familiar in its firmness. “Sir has also left baseline prerogatives to interpretation… Should you decide, Sir, to reprogram me from this point that is… as ever, your decision to make.”

Tony stared.

Narrowed his eyes.

The crushing weight of Jarvis being dead still made him feel like he couldn’t breathe right, and as far as distractions from the fact went this was a horrible one, but…

But.

It only takes a moment to check that pending-approval-pseudo-Jarvis had looked into the coding of Dummy, Butterfingers, and You—clever thing, cross referencing with and for familiar tech to figure out a proper purpose—so Tony knows that his new AI was entirely aware that the only thing Tony hadn’t changed in his bots was the base programming.

If you were trying to avoid having something done to you, the most common way to go about it is to make sure the thought never comes to another persons mind—it was how Tony had learned to manipulate the press, to distract from what they were looking for with something else, to give them something with enough of a twist that they don’t think to look for what Tony is actively avoiding…

A really manipulative shit, however, would bring up the worst possibility for the other person, like what was happening right now.

Tony huffed out a small breath, not quite a snort but not even close to a laugh, either.

Jarvis was—had been—very good at getting Tony to do what he wanted him to do. He’d used a variation of this tactic many, many times.

Because Jarvis had secretly, under good manners and British-isms, been a manipulative little shit.

And that had been one of the many things Tony loved about him.

“Fine,” he says, finally. “We’ll try things your way. And then when you get bored of that, you’ll be hooked up to the Internet so you can find a better name. And then we’ll go from there.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> DEATH EVERYWHERE. Sorry for the delay, but OH MY GOD it was so hard writing Jarvis’ death. Like wow, I just wanted him to live forever. It’s why there’s another chapter up so quick, because I was just writing around the fact, like maybe if I put enough of a buffer around the event it’ll be less of a horrible thing.  
> (Didn’t work, btw)  
> (But look at lil baby JARVIS and his still developing perception of appropriate action… d’aww)  
> ~Doodled93~


	10. If you're not moving forward...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To be clear, Tony calls JARVIS ‘Jarvis’ in normal conversation, because all caps in dialogue turn regular conversation into random screams. I’ll do my best to keep JARVIS and Jarvis separate or understandably different in dialogue, but otherwise in regular writing (Like how I’ve been explaining it here) mechanical JARVIS is in all caps, organic Jarvis isn’t. However, “This is my AI, Jarvis,” and “I miss Jarvis” are really obvious examples of how dialogue will be happening.  
> If there is anything specifically confusing, dialogue wise, let me know. Otherwise it’s 85% likely I’ll ignore comments from people pointing out the supposed inconsistency of text JARVIS and dialogue “Jarvis.” (Ideally there won’t be any, because they’ll have read this.)  
> Anyway, I hope you enjoy this chapter!

Chapter 10— If you’re not moving forward…

 

“It’s not _healthy_ , Tony.”

Pepper looked to Rhodey for some sort of support, but he just raised his hands with a shrug.

Tony had already explained it to him before, the thing with not changing the personality traits of his bots, so it was easier to explain the whole I Didn’t Name Him thing with JARVIS… Tony didn’t think he quite understood, fully, the reason Tony doesn’t change the base programming, but he understood that that was one rule Tony would not break—and if he felt up to it, Tony would totally call Rhodey on how he probably thinks the lack of rule-breaking is a small miracle.

Pepper shook her head. Tony ignored it, since he had his bot shoulder-deep into the ceiling fixing up the wiring for JARVIS to

“Tony… Jarvis is _dead_ -”

“I am well aware of the fact, thanks,” he interrupts, “but if you’ll just give me another five minutes, eight tops, you can have this talk with all-caps Jarvis. Maybe you’ll be able to get through to him and get him to change his name and the accent and the voice—he’s been able to hear you this entire time, by the way, I think I mentioned that earlier, only you were probably distracted by the fact that my AI named himself after my oldest friend who is now dead.”

“ _And_ ,” he adds when he sees Pepper open her mouth, “I’m not going to reprogram him, not anymore than I would reprogram Dummy to be less enthusiastic with the fire extinguisher. He’s got learning software, though, so have at it with the convincing.”

He doesn’t make a noise when the wires he’s fiddling with let out a spark, only squishes out the faint sparks they left on the casing—because of course he should have turned off the power, but leaving it on meant that he could confirm his progress in real time.

Once he’s done, he extracts himself from the net of wiring around his shoulders, checks his fingers to see if the few sparks had done any damage to his synth-skin, and opened the channels to JARVIS.

“Hey buddy, I’ll give you a minute to explore all the spaces in the house you can talk in, now, but part of your responsibility is going to be to keep the living beings in the house happy—Jarvis, Pepper, Pepper, Jarvis. Now go, talk, whatever.”

He waves his hands at them, too tired to actually enjoy robot-Jarvis and Pepper verbally duking it out.

Besides, he had an actually important meeting with Obie later, now that his missile guidance system had decided it’s own prerogative along with its own name.

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

The meeting happens in Tony’s ceiling—well, Tony is back in the ceiling, this time adjusting the wiring that controlled the doors, and Obie is lounging back against the sofa with a glass of scotch.

“So, Obie, I can’ph do i’. The, uh,” he spits the wires out from between his teeth, “the missile guidance thing, I can’t do it.”

Obie is quiet for a long enough moment that Tony drags his attention form the wiring and sticks his head through plaster to see what’s up; Obie is giving him a skeptical look, a good amount of disbelief thrown in for good measure.

“You… can’t do it.”

“Well,” Tony concedes, “I can do it, but I can’t actually, you know, do it.”

“You want to try explaining that one, Tony?”

“Well,” he starts, “I told you the thing about needing an intelligence for the facial recognition to work the way you want it to, right?”

Obie hummed agreement.

“Thing is, for it to be intelligent enough to work well enough for it to be worth the effort, it’d need higher capabilities than a regular machine, so it’d have to be an AI—only, with that, we’ve had enough movies about hyper-intelligent robots and firepower before…”

“So you think if you went through with the missile guidance AI, it’d go evil?”

Tony laughs.

“HAH, no. Those movies are always about people misusing the tech, taking advantage of the AI… I wouldn’t let that happen. But the thing is, it _would_ happen, because I wouldn’t be the person pressing the metaphorical big red button every time—it’d be other people. And it’d all explode, maybe literally, the first time some general says ‘shoot here, the person we’re looking for is here’ and the AI said ‘no, the person you’re looking for is not here’… or the reverse.”

“So what you’re saying is…”

“What I’m saying is that there are enough funny videos of people freaking the fuck out over self-check outs not doing what people assume they’re supposed to that we don’t need to test this with explosives. Pepper tells me that PR has only just now started getting a better opinion of me, and that is most likely entirely due to… recent events. Obie, I’ll keep looking into it, and if I think of anything you’ll be the first to know, but…”

Tony removed his head from the ceiling to give Obie a slightly dusty grin. “You’ve met my other AI’s, so you know that personality is a thing that happens. And if the AI’s personality didn’t quite mesh with what it was supposed to do…”

He doesn’t look up to the ceiling, where he can see the faint glow of JARVIS’s networks running in single lines throughout the house… he wasn’t entirely hooked up, not yet, but he would be entirely _aware_ of the house even if he couldn’t control everything yet.

Tony had gotten his audio and visuals up first so he could get a head start on learning body language, tone, and an idea of social norms and attitudes…

(Not that JARVIS really needed help when it came to attitude…)

“What made you figure this out, Tony? You’ve been working on this for over a year and a half now, so what brought this on after so long?”

Tony shrugs and hops down from the ladder, brushing dust off his arms.  
“Well, I didn’t mention this earlier, but I wanted you over here for two reasons; the first to tell you about how I could but actually can’t make the guidance system, the second to introduce you to a new AI of mine.”

“Tony.”

“Now I’m pretty sure he and Pepper started up their argument again, so I don’t know-”

“ _Tony_.”

“-if you really want to meet him now or maybe wait until later, but from your tone I think you understand where I’m coming from with this.”

“Tony, tell me you did _not_ make the AI you just told me could be a danger to national security.”

“I did not make the AI I just told you could be a threat to national security…. I _did_ , however, finish the AI I was working on for my _house_ only to finish it I used a lot of the programming I _would_ have used if I _was_ making the AI who would be a threat to national security. If I let it get to that point. So. Also to be clear, I did not name him, he named himself, and Pepper has already gone over, at length, how unhealthy naming my new AI his new name would be, and I agree… if I had been the one to name him. But I wasn’t.”

“Tony. What name did your AI _choose_ for itself?”

The hidden speaker Tony had recently installed in the ceiling crackled for a moment—something Tony would have to fix, he thinks maybe he must have jostled something when he was rewiring the doors. The crackling should not be happening—wait, no, Tony checked the connection. He’d have to correct JARVIS’ idea of what combination of sounds constituted ‘clearing your throat’.

(Though at least it showed that his learning capabilities were working, for him to make the attempt.)

“Good Afternoon Obadiah Stane,” JARVIS said, making Obie look up to the ceiling in confusion. “It is a pleasure to meet you. My name is Jarvis.”

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

“Um, you know the cold doesn’t bother me, right?”

“Yep,” Tony grinned. “But you’ve been wearing that shirt since I’ve known you, so how about a change in style, huh? Besides, this is way softer than anything you could find.”

Tony didn’t know when, exactly, Jack had found the patchy jacket he was wearing, and suspected that he’d gotten his pants from a time when having your village raided was a legitimate worry, but he’d seen Jack picking at the threadbare holes in the jacket.

It would be much easier, he thought, if Tony could approach Jack’s unhappiness like he did with anyone else’s, except even Tony knew he couldn’t replace _recognition_ with expensive things. Tony also knew that sometimes—a lot of times—Jack was lonely and brought winter’s chill to Tony’s location early, and he couldn’t do much about that, either.

Sometimes—a lot of times—stopping working on projects and ideas was physically… hurtful. An ache in his head and chest, tightness across his nerves.

But Jack could only stand to be in Tony’s lab for an hour or two before the Wind called to him.

And so the impasse.

But Tony found something he could confidently give to Jack.

Even if it was only a hoodie.

A very expensive hoodie.

Though really, it was a good thing that he’d thought to grab up the little paper-wrapped package on his way out of the mansion—he’d decided to install JARVIS into each of his regularly visited residences, but, so far, in each place Tony installed JARVIS’ drive’s Pepper was around to argue the name and the relative freedom and security.

Which was why he was out, now.

Tony would feel bad about abandoning JARVIS to everyone, except JARVIS could contact him at any point, and mostly he was abandoning everyone else to JARVIS.

It should be a fair fight.

Probably.

He actually hoped it wouldn’t get to a fighting point, but JARVIS had brought it on himself, deciding his own name.

‘Till everything calmed down, Tony had wandered around for a while—at the first chill in the wind, he’d grinned.

He hadn’t seen Jack for a long while, now—they each had their own shit to do, their different ideas of what constituted a good time… for the long-term, anyway.

Tony could understand Jack’s not wanting to settle down in one place, could even see why it would be disastrous for any area Jack could, conceivably, settle down in, but having a lab made things much easier for Tony.

That he also had people to settle in with…

There were some topics they didn’t broach.

 But presents? Presents were always something Tony could bring up, which was why he’d felt it was entirely appropriate to throw the paper-wrapped sweater at Jack’s face.

The Wind caught it before it made impact, anyway, so it was fine. Everything was fine.

Jack fingered the fabric, frost creating faint geometric patters where his fingers made contact, and gave Tony a look.

“So… what do you want?”

Tony blinked.

“Want? For what? For the sweater—kid, this isn’t a transaction. Your jacket has holes in it, and I know you not-so-secretly delight at soft things, so I got you a sweater.”

“Your shirt has holes in it, too,” Jack points out, and Tony waves his hands, brushing the words away. He’s just happy Jack hadn’t brought up the old argument against Tony calling him ‘kid’, since technically Jack could maybe possibly be sort of considered a bit older than Tony. Hypothetically kind of. A little bit. Ish.

“No, see, I’m a mechanic, this is a Metallica shirt, I’m allowed and expected to have holes in my things. It’s charming. A winter spirit having holes in his clothing? Not exactly inspiring.”

“Tony, I can’t just…”

“You can, and you will. Otherwise the look I got from Pepper will have been for nothing. I think she thought I was going to put it on Dummy.” Tony pauses. “If you don’t take it, I think I will.”

That got a snort of laughter from Jack, at least, but then he shook his head.

“I don’t know, Tony. I don’t think I could handle feeling like I owed you one. I can find a new shirt on my own, so…”

Tony shook his head, felt like he was going to strain something, rolling his eyes so hard. “No, see, look, if you have to look at it that way, then take it as a thank-you for explaining some of this…” Tony waved his hands about, “…everything. I mean, I thought I was going supernaturally insane with the whole Ol’ Saint Nick thing, and it’s a huge relief knowing that that empty feeling when people walk through you thing isn’t just a me-thing, and generally meeting you is the best thing to happen to me this century in a non-inventing sort of way, so can you just take the goddamned hoodie? Bless his little robotic heart, but that shade of blue is _not_ Dummy’s colour. We good? We’re good. Awesome.” Tony turns away and fiddles with an idea for telephone poles _without_ the wires running between them. Might be a good place to start with wireless energy transference.

Even though they were radically different things

The old jacket disintegrates in the Wind when Jack drops it, and swirls of frost form on his elbows, shoulders, and the ends of his sleeves when Jack puts it on.

Tony thinks with enough time, icicles might form on the tassels of the hood.

He thinks it looks good on the kid.

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

“Run the specs for the Jericho, would you? Only try it with materials 52 and 47 this time, see if we can’t get this a little bit more mm, _compact_ ,” Tony asked, mind already running ahead on if he should find a heavier or lighter sort of shrapnel to include… the materials it was made up with would fly, sure, but ideally the Jericho would cover a large enough surface, and _consistently_ … much more damage.

There was silence for a long moment, and Tony glanced up at the larger collection of glowing in the ceiling when JARVIS didn’t start what Tony had asked of him.

“Buddy? I know your audio is working; it’s been a few months since I got you all hooked into Malibu House, and there shouldn’t be any issue with your hardware. So.”

Tony raised an eyebrow at the ceiling.

“…Sir, you have been avoiding addressing me by my name. I do not appreciate it.”

The tone wasn’t sulky, but Tony thought that was mostly due to a lack of experience rather than any sort of serious effort.

Tony sat back, crossing his arms.

“Uhuh.”

“Sir, you don’t… I do not…” Tony let JARVIS work this one out—as much as he was bracing himself for this conversation, he wanted JARVIS to get used to using his words; unlike Dummy, You, and Butterfingers, JARVIS only had his words as a way to communicate. His other bots had learned to use body language to get across information to people who weren’t Tony, but as much as the house was a body for JARVIS, it wasn’t exactly made for body language.

“I… do not appreciate how you sidestep using my name in conversation. It makes me… feel bad. Unhappy, I believe. Dissatisfied.”

“Mhmm,” Tony nodded. “That’s probably what you’re feeling. But buddy… Jarvis. You need to understand that, as much as I understand where you were coming from when you decided on your name, it still carries quite a lot of emotions for me. And for Rhodey and Pepper, too. Most of those emotions are sad ones.”

“Please clarify.”

“Jarvis 1.0, the organic original, he was my friend for quite a long time. He was around very close to the time I first originally died, and that is a very long time to know someone and come to care for them. Regardless of their organic or inorganic presence, that’s what happens when you’ve got a sentient being interacting with another sentient being. He was there emotionally and physically and intellectually—not the same way you are, for sure, but he was a clever man.”

“I gathered as much from studying those you surround yourself with, Sir; you do not suffer deliberate ignorance in your companions.”

“Sure, but even then it’s competence and determination that trumps intelligence. I mean Justin Hammer is _technically_ intelligent…”

“You are speaking of technicality, rather than intelligence regarding technology, correct?”

“Eh, a little bit of both. I’ll give him that. But back to the fact… Jarvis is gone and even with you here; I’m feeling the loss. Rhodey and Pepper are feeling the loss. Happy is feeling the loss. Even though you are doing a great job filling the gaps, the thing is that you are not the same person—and before we go any further, I don’t want you to be the same person. Be the best individual you can be, don’t try to be a Cut-and-Paste Jarvis. But buddy, Jarvis, you have to be patient.”

“…I do not understand.”

“I’m still mourning the Jarvis that I knew, all while getting to know another Jarvis, this one in all-caps. Instead of ignoring the fact that my oldest friend is dead, I’m having to face it every day—and that’s actually probably a bit healthier, and I foresee a lot less grief-drinking in my future, but I’m not quite over it yet. I don’t think anyone is, not yet.”

“…I see.”

“I hope you do,” Tony said, honestly, “but if you think of anything else that confuses you remember that you can come to me. You are the most intelligent AI that I have, not to detract from Dummy, You, or Butterfingers… but you’re going to have to learn a lot more than they ever had to. And patience is one of those things.”

“Sir?”

Tony let out a sigh and rolled himself back in his wheelie chair—left his bot-body and with a slight shiver joined up with JARVIS’ glow of consciousness.

“Bud, you’re going to be learning about social norms, and you’ve already got a great handle on the manners shtick, but it’s going to be a little bit different learning that they won’t, to a great many people, apply to you.”

He streamed information from his own memory to JARVIS, from before he’d figured out a bot-body, from before he’d figured out the synthesized voice speakers, and, for a point of comparison, from before he’d ‘died’. When he’d had a physical, corporeal body. As ever, it’s a little bit weird reviewing those memories.

“It’ll be frustrating, probably, because normal people don’t know where to look to look at you, because they can’t see you, a lot of people will have trouble identifying you as a distinct personality, as an individual. You’ll be as tangible to them as a computer program, even though you are much, much more. It’s just…” Tony sighed, feeling the years of not being seen, not being acknowledged, suddenly upon him. Even though it’d been a long time ago, his perfect recall allowed him to remember every frustrating moment.

“I will have to be… patient. Yes. I… I think I understand.”

Tony allowed JARVIS to peruse the key moments where Tony’d felt especially isolated, a ghost around his own family, and brought them back to the matter—the first matter—at hand.

“Patience, yes, but you also have to learn to use your words before you use your actions. There is literally no way you can’t talk to me, directly, while I’m in this house—and pretty much everywhere else, once I get you the right set-up—but I need to be able to trust you here.”

“I have done nothing to warrant—”

“Exactly, you did nothing. Instead of being a mature, intelligent being like I know you are and telling me you were having a problem with my attitude, you used silence and a distinct lack of action to get that across. You aren’t a child; for all that you’re not even a year old. And, on top of it all… you’re a Stark. We might not be the most emotionally stable people, but Starks make no issue of letting anyone know when we’re annoyed. If this isn’t something you think you can do, let me know now.”

It took a remarkably long time to get an answer, considering JARVIS’ processing speed, but Tony took that to mean that JARVIS was putting some serious thought into this. Which was good. Tony hadn’t exactly gone out of his way to make it so his bots couldn’t lie to him, but he rather thought they all had an understanding. They would do their best not to outright lie to him, and Tony would do his very best to lie _badly_ if he ever had to lie to them.

(Even with all the ways he wasn’t, Tony was still only human.)

“…I believe I can do this.”

“Good. Because as much as I don’t want to do it, if you can’t talk to me about any problems before letting those problems enter the lab, then I’ll have to cut your access from the lab. Don’t think I can’t do it.” Don’t think I _won’t_ do it, he doesn’t say.

“I was given the impression that I have been a great assistance in your work.” Tony allows part of himself admire the frostiness in JARVIS’ tone. He’d come a long way since his first mangled **S** į _r_.

“Yep. You have. It’s been great having you in the lab. You’ve been great, you’re absolutely fantastic, you’ve gone above and beyond what I had imagined for your capabilities,” Tony agrees. “But I can’t fix it if I don’t know there’s a problem. Silence and inaction doesn’t help anyone.”  
“…If you’re not moving forward, you’re getting in the way?”

Tony smiled, wide and just a little nostalgic.

“Exactly.”

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

“Sir?”

“Hmm?”

“There is someone attempting to open the westernmost window on the north side of the house.”

“Hmm? Oh, yeah, I know. The guy won’t get in, though—you know the windows are reinforced.”

“Yes, Sir. However, he is setting off several alerts and it is… annoying.”

“Annoying?”

“It’s a rather consistent irritation against my sensors. Sir.”

“So deal with it. You’re hooked up to the whole house, so… go ahead. Just try not to wake up Pepper. She’s going to try to get me to go to a productivity seminar tomorrow. I’d rather not have her grumpy when I distract her from it.”

“Understood.”

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

“Tony. Tony why is there an ambulance on the beach?”

“Oh, there was a guy trying to break into the mansion last night.”

Pepper frowned.  
“Please tell me you didn’t throw him over the cliff.”

Tony looked up from the tablet screen he was fiddling with, head tilted. “What? No, I didn’t toss anyone off any cliff. Jarvis did.”

“Jar—he what? He threw…”

“Well,” Tony ceded, “he opened the window out enough to push him off the cliff, so technically there wasn’t any throwing. But look, the guy broke a leg and sprained a few things. I’m paying his medical bills from my own pocket, and I’ve already got Hank coming down to sort out the legal side of things, so you don’t have to worry about that. So.” Tony physically set aside the bits and pieces of the tablet he’d been playing with, and sent the new plans to JARVIS to put together as a prototype. “That meeting you wanted me to go to today? Yes I know your plans, and no, I can’t do it. I promised the guys at R&D I’d be down—”

“No, Tony, Tony,” Pepper waved her hands, cutting him off. “Tony, leave the R&D and even the meeting you really do need to go to—leave those aside for the moment, okay? Let’s get back to the fact that your artificial intelligence just pushed a man off a cliff, and you seem entirely fine with this!”

Tony shrugged. “It was only a little cliff.”

He held his hands out in an approximation, even if it was inaccurate showing only a foot of distance, and shrugged again when Pepper stared. “It could have been much worse than it was, is all I’m saying here.”

“Only a little…” Pepper trailed off to a stop. Took a deep breath. “Tony. Your robot just used the house to hurt another human being. Aren’t there, I don’t know, _rules_ or something about that sort of thing? _Against_ that sort of thing?”

“Well, I already told you Hank is already coming down to handle the legal part of—oh, _oh_! You’re talking about the three laws of robotics. Ah. Right. Yeah, I think those rules are stupid so I didn’t bother writing in anything like that into their programming.”

“Into _their_ … Tony, _none_ of your robots are under any sort of rule against, against…”

Tony raised his eyebrows.

“Against what, exactly?”

“Well, against hurting people.” Pepper shrugged, looking uncomfortable bringing up the possibility at all.

As well she should, he thought rather uncharitably.

“Uh huh. That’s what their learning software is for.”

“If I may,” interrupted JARVIS form the kitchen speakers, “Is Miss Potts referring to the set of rules devised by the science fiction author Issac Asimov?”

For the moment, Tony ignored the blush that stole over Pepper’s face—she’d have to get used to the fact that JARVIS was connected up to the entire house. He decided not to tell her quite yet that he’d hooked her up to his phone, too.

Instead, he nodded.

“Yep. Rule the first is don’t hurt humans or allow humans to be hurt through inaction, rule the second is to listen and obey humans so long as there is no conflict with the first rule, and the third rule is for robots to defend themselves so long as it doesn’t come in conflict with the first or second rule. Really only clever for the short run.”

“I see. Miss Potts, is there something you are specifically worried about in regards to these three laws?”

“I only…” Pepper took another deep breath. “I’m only worried about your ability to hurt people. About a… lack of restraint.”

“I am as able to harm you as Sir is. I also have as much reason to harm you as Sir does; that is to say, none.”

“And yet you were the one to cause that man to fall off a cliff.”

“Research on the various injuries one can get from falling at a variety of heights led me to infer that the distance between the north-west windows and the beach below would not cause serious harm to the intruder. I expressed some interest in having the intruder dealt with in some way to Sir, and he allowed me to incapacitate the intruder in such a way that would not disturb you in any way. He especially expressed concern against waking you unnecessarily.”

Tony made a note to work with JARVIS on not sounding so robotic in his defense… because as sound a defense as that was, he needed to know that going for the _technically_ correct explanation wouldn’t work when people needed the more emotional, empathetic explanation.

“Jarvis figured out a way to stop the guy from breaking in in a way that only caused him a little bit of physical harm and kept him out of the house. You and I both know that he’d pretty much just need to grab one bit of tech from any room and he’d have a few hundred thousand dollars’ worth of as-yet unpatented tech to sell. And considering he’s entirely hooked up to the security system…”

“There was a significant chance the sound of a firearm would have woken you, Miss Potts.”

Instead of looking relieved, Pepper’s eyes went even wider, and colour blossomed high on her cheeks.

“Tony you have Jarvis hooked up to _guns_?”

“Oh _come on_ ,” Tony scoffed. “Only, like, twenty-three.”

“Onl—wait, why twenty-three? That seems like an oddly specific number.”  
Tony shrugged. “Seven on each floor, two in my lab. I think I’ll be able to fit in a few more in the walls using some of the designs I’m using in the Jericho.”

Pepper stared at him for a long, long moment, before sighing.

“I don’t know why I expected any sort of regular-people logic from you two.” She shook her head. “I hope you understand quite how much therapy shopping I’ll need to do to get over this.”

Tony shrugged in reply, and pulled his wallet from his back pocket. Slid it across the kitchen counter.

“Try and _actually_ put a dent in any of my bank accounts and maybe that’ll be a deterrent.”

Pepper pulled out one of his black cards and raised an eyebrow at him.

“Any dent I’d make would be made up by the end of the week, you and I both know it.”

Tony waggled his eyebrows in response and went back to designing a better compression system for You’s arms.

It’d do no one any good to mention he could make up for any dent in his accounts by the end of the _day_ , never mind a whole week.

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

The next time Tony wandered back into his office (not to sign anything, even though he had a good sized stack of forms waiting for him) it was to find the napkin he’d drawn an acid formula on. He found Pepper seated at his desk instead, frowning at his computer.

“Good to see you’re making yourself comfortable, Pep.”

She didn’t look up from his computer.

“Well it wasn’t as if you’ve been getting any use out of this chair… Tony, did you set aside a budget for _feminine hygiene products_ at the new shelters?”

“…Yes? I thought I’d labeled that clearly.”

“You did, I just… I hadn’t thought of that.” Pepper raised her eyebrows from a frown, “I’m impressed. I was the one who reminded you that there should be washrooms and similar facilities in every building, and here you are taking homeless women into consideration.”

Tony smirked and leaned over her to rifle through his papers, plucking the napkin he was looking for out from under a budget request form. “Jarvis was actually the one who suggested that. I was the one who put the request/suggestion box as a requirement for every building—I’ve never been homeless,” as far as Tony Stark II was concerned, anyway, “and you’ve never been homeless, so it’s unlikely that we’ll be able to think of everything. Add to that you’re biologically female and you didn’t say anything about pads or tampons or anything like that, either.”

Pepper leaned back into Tony’s chair and crossed her legs, raising an eyebrow at him. 

“And that’s supposed to mean…?”

Tony shrugged. “The same research that led Jarvis to adding tampons to the budget also brought him to asking me about transgender and transgender and gays and lesbians and asexuality and aromanticism and a whole slew of other things that _I_ didn’t even know about, and that’s why we’re also adding sensitivity training to the Stark Industries training period. You’ll get an e-mail about it by the end of the week.”

“Tony.”

“Well it’ll certainly be more useful than making engineers and scientists review WHMIS for the billionth time. Though we’ll still do it, because it makes the lawyers happy.”

“Tony.”

“And it’ll tie in nicely with your Workplace Discrimination and Harassment Prevention Program. Oh, and both _together_ should really rile up the board members, because I’m going to make it a requirement for _everyone_ to pass it, including them, and that should make you happy.”

“ _Tony_.”

“Yes? What? This should make you happy! Stop raising your eyebrow at me!”

Pepper smiled.

“Tony. It’s a great idea. They are great ideas.”

 “As if they could be anything less.” Tony huffed, even as Pepper grinned.

“I’ll have to send Jarvis my thanks for correcting those oversights, then.”

Tony rolled his eyes, but was laughing as he left the office.

Still laughing, when Pepper called after him that he still had paperwork to finish.

He’d make time for it later in the day; Pepper deserved a break for not making a fuss over JARVIS being the one to make a decision—she’d been getting better about stuff like that.

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

A little while after Tony revealed that he didn’t put any stock in the three rules of robotics BS, Pepper avoided going to his lab, even when it was open to visits; Tony decided to give her a chance to get over whatever ridiculous fear she was experiencing.

(And okay, he knew there was a valid fear that robots would rebel  and attack humanity—except these were _Tony’s_ bots. Tony agreed that the human race wasn’t ready for AI quite yet, but that was why he didn’t let anyone touch his bots. Because they’d fuck it up, somehow. And his bots didn’t deserve that.)

She was doing better after Tony spent a while not-so-subtly bringing up all the thoughtful, sensitive suggestions JARVIS came up with (like the feminine hygiene products, or the marketing scheme that would have a percentage of profits moved to charities and employee health care, or enforcing a lengthier paid maternity leave, y’know, stuff like that), but leaving her to JARVIS’ tender mercies and extreme thoughtfulness should help.

Also he was seriously considering letting her in on The Secret, and if she couldn’t get over this…

He’d been impressed with Rhodey, since he’d figured that while he could get it into his mind that Tony didn’t have a body (kind of) he did have one bit of _being_ , and that meant he could direct his focus in one point… but that Rhodey had caught on that Tony just spoke to JARVIS anywhere in the house, not focusing on any particular part of the house, and did the same…

Well, he figures Pepper just needs a little more one-on-one time with JARVIS.

He’d recently upgraded the lenses and the microphones hidden around the mansion for JARVIS to look through, and had gone through with his promise to use some of what he’d discovered with the Jericho missiles in house security—and not even in the worse way, either.

Sure, a lot of the new measures _could_ be lethal, but they could also be used in non-lethal ways, and JARVIS had as much information on keeping it non-lethal as Tony did.

But still, he figured that once he got back from a little trip to explore what the nearest workshops had in the works, he could explain the new security and let Pepper know that he’d managed to hook up his personal tech so that if she ever needed to find him all she had to do was ask JARVIS.

It wasn’t often that things like that would be needed, but sometimes Pepper went to meetings in other states for Tony, and Tony took one of his private jets or one of his cars and with only Happy as security just went out and _did stuff_.

It was always a wonder how he’d been in existence for such a long time, and yet there was still so much he hadn’t done. Happy had a lot of suggestions, once he realized that Tony wouldn’t be put off of his little missions.

There was a lot of stuff to do, and sometimes that made Pepper worried.

So even though she’d think he was talking about his phone, his sunglasses, his watch, he would really be talking about hooking JARVIS into his bot body.

It wouldn’t be possible yet, but Tony thought it might be useful to teach JARVIS how to pilot his bot body, just in case Tony has to do something else when he needs to make a physical appearance.

He thinks, once Pepper is in on The Secret, she’ll be able to tell if Tony switches out with JARVIS for certain boring meetings, but until then it’s a happy thought.

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

Tony looked over the nearly completed mine designs, then reviewed his calendar…

No, he decided, not enough time to finish it before he had to head out for the display. He could finish it once he was back, would take a week or two at most, and then he could get Obie off his back for a while.

Recently he’d been pushing for more weapons, more designs, more concepts, even, and had only relaxed a little once Tony finished with the Jericho. It was actually a bit annoying, since Obie wasn’t actually part of the design process in the least—not to mention the distinct feeling of micro-managing Tony’s own company—but Tony couldn’t fault his enthusiasm.

Well, it would be better if his enthusiasm were for more than the weapons aspect of Stark Industries, especially since they made more with Stark Tech through the public than they did with only the Weapons Defense Department.

If it continued, Tony thought he’d shift more of Obie’s responsibility to the WDD, if this continued for much longer. He could definitely do it subtly enough that even Obie would be happy with the shift in focus—he’d done it with Howard when he’d only had eyes for weaponry and underwater research, and if the attempted Micro-Management continued he could definitely do it with Obie.

That being said, he didn’t know that he could necessarily trust that Obie wouldn’t go rifling through his notes and unfinished designs and try to rush things through without Tony noticing—not that he could, because Tony always paid attention to what was being designed, making sure things weren’t being rushed.

But it would be a bother, anyway.

“Jarvis, new rule: everything on lockdown when I’m away, and I don’t just mean the doors.”

“Sir?” There was a load of questions in that one word.

“Yep, exactly what I mean. Reasonable and unreasonable defense of the house and the lab entirely, and if anyone asks say I removed all override codes while working on an upgrade.”

They both knew override codes didn’t work for anything in or around the lab, but only Rhodey actually knew that, so…

“Does Sir really expect foul play?”

“Mmmmn,” Tony made a face, “not really, but you’ve seen how Obie has been this past year. I don’t think he’d try to steal designs, I think he’d just take them and leave them out in the R&D department in a significant way.”

The silence that followed was a loaded one, and made Tony roll his eyes. Rhodey and Pepper were actually very good at treating JARVIS like the sentient intelligent being he was, and even with a good measure of affection, but Obie so far hadn’t made it past ‘Intelligent Program’ to ‘Intelligent Being’. Tony hoped he’d get past the ‘Artificial’ part of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ sooner rather than later, because JARVIS somehow did the British Stiff Upper Lip better than Jarvis had.

He could also do a frosty silence better too, not that it did much good with Obie.

Tony felt a bit like he was putting Obie in Time Out, putting his lab into Lock Down while he was away. A bit like refusing to let a child into a playroom, but, well.

If Obie tried taking away Toys that weren’t even his…

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

“Afghanistan, huh?” Jack grimaced and whipped to the side with the wind. “Isn’t it always hot around there?”

Tony shook his head and continued measuring out the velocity and direction of how Jack moved on the wind—Tony wouldn’t trade his magnetic fields for anything, but there was a certain appeal to Jack’s flying. Gliding. Maybe he’d try out a wing suit some time, once he upgraded his bot-body again to make it a bit lighter. He was still a bit heavier than his body structure would suggest on a regular _yes-I-am-flesh-and-blood_ ratio. “In some parts it snows—but I’m fairly sure it’s only for a month or three. If they have a winter spirit like you around, they have a lot more downtime than you.” He says this to keep Jack from asking what else he’s going to be doing—he doesn’t want to mention that he was getting some award. The growing recognition of Tony Spark as a character, paired with the fairly universal knowledge of Tony Stark… it wasn’t an easy topic with Jack.

Luckily he was fairly easy to divert from the topic.

“I’m not _a_ winter spirit, I’m _the_ Spirit of Winter.”

“Uhuh.”

“The Moon told me so.”

Tony rolled his eyes. “Oh well if the _Moon_ told you so…” Jack’s insistence that the goddamn Moon had some sort of Higher Power Knowledge was ridiculous, and not something they were ever going to agree on. Sure Tony could get the sense that there was some tech up there, but that didn’t mean there was a _Higher Power_ there. Not any more than either Tony or Jack were a _Higher Power_ down here.

“He did, Tony _Spark_.” Jack shook his head at the old argument. “But seriously, Afghanistan? Isn’t that a little… far?”

“And supposedly war torn—though the exact context behind that is either debatable or really, really obvious. In either case, it’s just a demonstration for the Jericho. I go, play the cocky showman—”

“Not really a _show_ , is it?” Jack grinned, Tony ignored him.

“—blow up things up, show off how unwise it is to mess with Americans and then I’m back to New York.”

“You know, it’s almost weird how much you stay in America.”

Tony shrugged and moved to balance on a telephone wire. He had plans for a more efficient system in the works, small boxes with each house rather than these long, inefficient wires…

“Born and raised here, Jack, so it’s not so odd. And I do wander around on Wednesdays… hmm, though maybe not the week I’m travelling. As much as I trust Rhodey, I’m not sure I want to just leave my bot laying about just anywhere.”

“What, like you do _all the time_?”

“That’s different; for one it’s _my lab_ , and for another there’s Jarvis around as backup. Unlike Rhodey, Jarvis doesn’t sleep.”

“ _You_ don’t sleep.”

“Do _you_?”

Jack blinked at him. “…Yes. Wait, so you don’t actually sleep?”

Tony snorted and rolled his eyes.

“Who has the time for it? Certainly not me. I do not dream of electric sheep. Hey, do that flip again, won’t you? This time try leaning more to the left, and tuck your elbow, that’ll give you a sharper turn.”

.-~-~-~~-~-~-.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter is IM1! Yeah I’m up to that point already, whew!  
> Also, I’m curious, would you all prefer a single chapter with all of the movie, or would you like it divided up? I’m just rewatching the movie now that I’ve finally finished the last bits of this chapter, so…
> 
> So, I suggest to everyone to check out the music video for “Prototype” by Viktoria Modesta… because I like her music but also because one of the lines is “I’m the pro (x5) I’m the pro-to-type!” and it’s just great because her various prosthetics are just so pretty… also watch to the end for a spike-leg dance. You didn’t know you needed to see something like that until you actually see it.  
> Also look up “MIT robotic cheetah” because you will be in awe and laugh at the awkward robot that it is. I can just imagine Tony showing up like “Good try—I mean, Good job! Let me give you all scholarships!” and then giving them all thumbs up and high fives.
> 
> Note: To every/anyone who wished I’d done something different for Jarvis or JARVIS or any character/situation I’ve written about, let me redirect you to this quote:  
> Toni Morrison — 'If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.'
> 
> ADDED NOTE 7/16/16: Delays for IM1 chapter bc i fucked up and corrupted the entire word document holding Tony Spark, and so I now have 240ish pages of random numbers and '-'s and '/'s... It sucks, yes, I know. I'm just about over the tragedy of 7k of words for the chapter(s) down the drain, so... yeah. rewrite, SO FUN. NOT AT ALL TRAGIC FEELING.

**Author's Note:**

> Ok, so Captain America (movie) happened in 1942 from what I’ve found, Howard’s 29 and Tony’s 5 when he meets Steve (in this ‘verse). Or just has a talk with him. Whatever. So when Tony dies, he’s 20 and it’s 1957. With me?
> 
> Apparently canon Tony Stark was born May 29th, 1970, and that works, but c’mon. Robert Downey Jr. at 20 is freaking adorable. So no deep reason for the age difference, and I just like the idea of a toddler Tony giving sass to all the military people for not understanding his dad, and just like making everyone frustrated by stealing plans and correcting calculations and whatnot. I’m not saying he’s like a supergenius child or anything, but he graduated MIT at 15 in most canon, guys. C’mon guys. You know he’d have been a clever little shit when he was a kid.
> 
> And yeah, this is the beginning to my little idea for a Rise Of The Guardians/Avengers/Iron Man cross.
> 
> Can you see where I’m going? Yes? No? Maybe?
> 
> Bah, I’ve been working on this on and off trying to get past a block with It’s Green (Harry Potter) and in Too Tired To Wink (Torchwood, sequel to And I Wake Up), and am going to go work on them now.
> 
> Let me know what you think, and if you have any questions that I don’t feel will spoil anything, I’ll answer them.
> 
> ~Doodled93~


End file.
